


C-S-T-L

by komodobits



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, M/M, deafness, deliberate self-mutilation, limb amputation, minor gore, reference to nuclear warfare, simualted war crimes including death of prisoners and a child, situations similar to terminal illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 14:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 90,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/komodobits/pseuds/komodobits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>LJ DCBB 2013. It’s been nineteen years since the beginning of the Last War, and the Alliance Army is losing land faster than it can supply good men to defend it. Their hope is the synthesis of Android Angeles, a series of humanoid machines designed without the capacity to feel, and thus enabling them to be the perfect super soldiers. In order to check their battle suitability, the first prototypes are sent down with a landing party of the men they will later replace, and Sergeant Dean Winchester is paired with Unit 5284-C-S-T-L for the assignment. Cas, as Dean nicknames him, is easy enough to work with - once you get past the emotional vacancy and blatant disregard for human life, that is - but as the squad's tour goes on, Dean gets to wondering whether the Android Angeles are really as unfeeling as he's been told, or if the fear of a reality in which malfunctioning prototypes will be shut down is too great for them to exist any other way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2013 Dean/Cas Big Bang on LJ. Companion artwork by dosymedia.

Functions test. Left hand – fingers: curl, grab, release. Right hand. Elbows, lock and bend. Twist at the waist. Touch toes: one, two, three. Bend knees and straighten. Lift and lower – left foot; right foot. Inhale – hold. Voice.

"Beta-testing Android Angeles prototype C. Unit 5284-C-S-T-L. Database accessible. Ready for deployment."

Exhale.

  
 ****

"Sir, if it's alright, I'd like to open this discussion by stating, just for the record, that even though Corporal Bass was out of line, no matter what he may have already said to you, I didn't actually try to behead him—"

Captain Rufus Turner stares at Dean, his head propped in his hand, wearing the expression of a man who spends his days counting down until his retirement. "Winchester."

"I mean, sure, I shoved him – I admit to that, and it was wrong – but I didn't know he was gonna trip and I didn't know he was gonna fall against the airlock – and then, see, it was Harvelle who accidentally pushed the—"

"Winchester."

Dean shuts up. He raises his eyebrows and looks at Captain Turner with a look of perfect innocence. "Sir?"

"That's not why I called you in here," he says wearily.

"Oh." Dean sits back in his chair. "In that case, sir, with all due respect, I have no idea what happened to Corporal Ba—"

"I called you in here," Rufus says, raising his voice over Dean's, "because you've been reassigned, sergeant."

While Dean sits in stupefied silence, Rufus clears his throat and tries to begin again. He meshes his fingers together and sets both hands on the desk in a gesture that looks awkwardly authoritative, as though he's seen someone else do it and thought it seemed like a nice idea.

"Winchester, you're one of a select few from Fox company being moved to become part of a specialised task force by the name of Blue October that will be operating on Earth in two months' time or so," he says, and he unclasps his hands to flick through some papers at the side of his desk. "I got a memo here says there'll be a briefing on your new training tomorrow morning, in the main training hall at oh-seven-hundred hours – just stuff to get you up to speed on what you'll be doing and how it'll be organised, etcetera, etcetera – you know how it goes."

"Yes, sir, I do."

"Right. Main training hall – oh-seven-hundred. Got that? Good. That'll be all, then." Rufus rocks onto the back legs of his chair, mouth stretching into a cavernous yawn, and he flaps a hand in the direction of the door. "You're dismissed."

Dean goes to leave and then, half-seated and half-hovering awkwardly in the air, he adds, "Actually – one question, sir – I was just wondering if you knew who else has been picked?"

Rufus slams the chair back down and narrows his eyes at Dean.

"I mean, I was just wondering if maybe there was anyone else I knew who was assigned—"

"Does it look like I've got a list of all your friends, Winchester?" Rufus says. "This ain't a goddamn slumber party – get out of my office."

Dean has known Captain Turner long enough to be able to identify the warning signs when he's T-minus-twenty to a minor explosion, and so Dean recognises now that it's time to go. He quickly rattles off the expected, "Yes, sir – sorry, sir – thank you – I'll see you later," and then hurries out before Rufus can throw anything at him.

There are a couple of young first-year recruits waiting uncertainly outside the door, probably there to be yelled at, and where Dean would usually at least offer them a reassuring smile, today he is preoccupied. A specialised Earth task force definitely beats his current assignment, which was officially titled Base Administration, but which actually boils down to scrubbing toilets and cleaning weapons for all the forces who are off to do real work somewhere else. It's an assignment Dean has been on for the best part of a month, and he's already taken to discussing with the rest of his team whether they think it would be possible to commit seppuku using the end of a mop. He'll be glad for a change, although he had never expected anything quite like this.

He heads for the elevator, down the two floors to the cafeteria, and upon entering the latter, Dean is met with the cacophony of some several hundred soldiers all talking, eating, and clattering their cutlery at the same time. There are five hundred-men companies in the 2nd Battalion of the Rifles Regiment to which Dean belongs, and a grand total of about four other battalions alongside his own, so feeding time at the waterhole is always chaotic, even when meal-times are divided up into several slots to keep the cafeteria from getting gridlocked with hungry troops.

As Dean joins the long dinner queue where it curves around the perimeter of the room, he scans the cafeteria for any sight of his usual meal-time companions. It's not too difficult, seeing as his brother is an easy six inches taller than most other people, and Charlie's hair means she can also be spotted a mile off. With his tray in hand, carefully balanced to avoid slopping his lasagne all over the linoleum, he finds them at the far edge of the room, deeply engaged in what seems to be a conversation about the finer points of having sex in a sink.

"I'm telling you, it can't be done!" Adam repeats, over and over like a mantra. "It just cannot be done!"

"It can!" Charlie argues, and she points a finger right into his face. "Okay. Let's say there's a dick and a hoohaha—"

"Am I the only one who feels like a lesbian should probably be able to say the word 'vagina' without blushing like a third-grader?" Jo says, and she grins at Dean as he sits down opposite her. "Hey, trouble-maker."

"No, come on - bear with me here. Dick and hooha!" Charlie insists, louder now so that some guys at the next table over turn to shoot her a weird look. "If the person with the dick sits inside the sink—"

"Don't even ask," Sam says as he sees Dean's bewildered reaction to Charlie and Adam's debate. "So how'd the meeting go?"

Dean puffs out his cheeks in an exaggerated sigh. "Well," he starts, "turns out it wasn't actually about knocking Aaron out with the airlock, so that's some good news!" He grimaces. "The bad news is that I might still get a meeting about knocking Aaron out with the airlock, since I accidentally brought it up."

Sam rolls his eyes. "You're an idiot."

"Wait, so what did he actually want, then?" Andy asks around a mouthful of pasta.

Dean hesitates, and he glances over his shoulder to see if any of the officers are nearby, unsure whether or not he's actually allowed to tell anyone else. "I've, uh, been taken out of the company?" he says in an undertone, and when the others inevitably kick off into noisy protest and exclamations of what the fuck, he hurriedly shushes them all. "Not permanently, or anything. But apparently me and some other people are being reassigned to some secret task force?"

"What?" Andy says incredulously, drawing the word out long and slow like taffy for added effect. "Why? What are you doing?"

"Hey, I got called for that, as well," Sam cuts in, a frown cutting a deep crease in his brow.

"Same here, only I thought we weren't meant to tell everyone," Jo says, and she sticks her tongue out at Dean.

The parallel conversation between Adam and Charlie, now discussing the dynamics of whether a boner in a sink would have enough height from the body for someone to ride it, is abruptly put on hold as they realise that a more interesting discussion is happening next to them, and they both turn to lean in towards Dean. "Hang on, what's going on?" Adam asks.

"Some special secret mission Dean's been put on," Andy tells him, with a sourness to his tone that indicates exactly what he thinks of this latest development.

Adam raises his eyebrows. "Whoa, what is it?"

Dean jerks his shoulders in a close approximation to a shrug. "Beats me, man."

Adam glances around between them all. "That's not fair! Why haven't I been reassigned? I can slam junior officers' heads into airlock doors too, if they want."

"Dude, it's nothing to do with Aaron," Dean tells him.

Andy huffs and spears another chunk of loose pasta. "Whatever," he says. "We probably didn't want to be on your special stinkin' assignment anyway."

"Maybe you were too short for it," Jo suggests, drumming her empty yoghurt spoon against her bottom lip, and she smirks.

Andy tips her yoghurt over.

  


As far as wars go, this one's a little unusual. No-one's sure who exactly came up with the moniker of the Last War - clearly someone with a taste for the theatrical - but it's stuck. It started with the usual business of the Allied Forces getting involved in other people's wars – the American and the British went to the aid of the Egyptian people after a military coup escalated wildly out of control, at which point the Egyptian Air Forces attempted to take out Washington D.C. War was declared on Egypt, which in turn took its own international allies with Libya and Israel, as the Chileans, Canadians, and Australians took the defensive side. North Korea saw an opportunity against the United States and broke the stalemate on nuclear weapons between them, taking out half of the eastern seaboard, and the Allied Forces retaliated. The rest is history.

Dean Winchester doesn't know a great deal of what happened in the early years; it began before he was born, and he only recalls that when he was growing up, half of the country was concerned with radiation poisoning and major cities were being decimated day by day. He remembers his mother with an oxygen mask, and his brother with a plastic stethoscope telling her that everything was going to be okay.

When the Last War was declared, no nation was exempt, because the collateral damage was enormous – try telling radiation poisoning and fifty-mile blast radiuses to take heed of international borders. Those same borders were shifting near constantly until it reached a point where it seemed as though every army was trying to take as much of the earth as they could hold onto. The Russians were the first to evacuate into privatised space stations; China followed, then Japan, and as such, the Allied Forces weren't far behind. If Dean had to hazard a definition as to when a World War becomes the Last, he'd guess that the line is probably drawn right about when the majority of the Earth's population escapes off the surface into shuttles and stations.

Dean was thirteen when a space station that his family could actually afford opened, and so he left the rubble of his old life behind, with only Sam to keep him grounded, and his father in tow. Since he joined the military, he's done a few Earth tours, fought a few battles, but he's never been back to Kansas. He doesn't know what this latest task force will require him to do – whether it'll be Korea or eastern Europe or south America – but whatever it is, if it brings him back to Earth again, then he's ready for it.

Dean and Sam rise early for their appointment the next, washed and dressed by oh-six-thirty – in Dean's case at least, although Sam still has to carefully brush his hair for another million years or so – and they head down together towards the main training hall. On the way, they bump into Charlie.

"Hey guys," she exclaims, beaming sunnily. "Guess who got dragged into Major Moseley's office this morning on the way to the gym to talk about her reassignment?"

"No way," Dean says, and he scrunches up his nose at her. "I thought they were only picking the best and brightest?"

Charlie goes to smack him in the arm, except she catches the eye of a senior officer wandering past and hurriedly pulls some of the force out of the movement so that instead she lovingly caresses his bicep, and Dean snickers. As soon as the officer is out of eyesight down the hall, however, she whacks him hard.

When they reach the training hall, a few others are already there, luckily all people he knows – Sergeant Victor Henriksen, from Dean's own platoon; Gordon Walker, who Dean has seen around but never really spoken to; Sergeant Talbot, again – seen, spoken to once and she revealed herself to be kind of an asshole; some goofy guy called Garth with whom Dean once had to share the longest, most agonising sentry position of his life. There are a handful of others, some whom Dean knows and some who he doesn't, and they stand in a loose almost-parade formation until the senior officers come striding down the hallway, count their numbers, and send them into the hall. Even then, their new squad still only stands at ten.

They file in past a squad of soldiers already on parade, stood neatly at attention. Dean glances over his shoulder at them as he passes them, and in spite of the perfect rigidity of their formation, their carefully blank faces as they concentrate on their positions, he manages to catch the eye of one of the men in the front of row – blue-eyed, a jaw that's glass-sharp. Dean winks at him.

There is no visible reaction, and then Dean can no longer see him as his own squad is lead to the far side of the training room and formed up into their own parade. It's informal, though; they aren't stood to attention, but just made to wait as the senior officers come in to address them.

"Listen in," Major Singer says as he settles in front of them. "I figure you're probably all wondering what in the hell's going on here, so I won't waste any time sugar-coating for you." He clears his throat and clasps his hands behind his back to signify that Official Business has just begun – the time for fun and familiarity is over. "You've each been chosen for your particular skill sets in a variety of fields for a specialised mission. While the rest of your company is on tour, you'll remain here to train, and then when they return in two months' time, you'll replace them in the field. It will be, for all intents and purposes, a typical campaign, except that you'll be testing some new military equipment that has not yet been released for ordinary use. We need to know first that they're safe – and that they work, mainly."

They? Dean frowns, and he glances over at Jo, to his left, who he is relieved to find looks similarly perplexed.

Major Singer takes a deep breath and seems for a moment as though he wants to say more, but then he deflates and looks away towards the rest of his officers. "I figure I should give the professionals the chance to let you in on the details," he says, almost as an afterthought. "Doctor Niehammer?"

Dean notices for the first time a woman he doesn't know, standing beside the officers. She wears a crisp white shell-suit, like a surgeon, instead of the military uniform he's used to seeing, and her brown hair is pulled back loosely off her face. She takes a few collected steps towards them. "Thank you, Major Singer. Now, then. Ladies – gentlemen – soldiers," she says, and bestows of them all a benevolent smile which is unsettlingly devoid of any real warmth. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Doctor Naomi Niehammer, and I am both the founder of Niehammer Corporation and the creator of Android Angeles, to which you will be shortly introduced. A little about the programme first, though, I think."

Her smile slides away to be replaced instead by an air of cool professionalism, and with her hands clasped neatly behind her back, she paces back and forth in front of them. With her shoes clacking sharply on the metal floor, she goes on: "We're at war. Doubtless you already know this. What you may not have realised, however, is that we're losing." She lets her eyes flit across each one of soldiers lined up before her as she speaks. "The Israelis have better equipment. The Russians have more fighting power. The Japanese have a higher standard of training – no offense." She flashes a hollow smile over her shoulders at the officers behind her, and then returns her attention to the front. "If this were simply a question of meeting force for force on the battlefield, our Allied Forces would have been destroyed a long time ago. Thankfully, it isn't, but that doesn't change the fact that we have to evolve where the war has evolved – we have to match it. That's where the Niehammer Corporation comes in."

She swivels to face them head-on with a resounding crack of her heels, reminiscent of a World War Two socialist goosestep that Dean has seen in too many cheesy propaganda videos warning them of what would happen if Earth falls into the wrong hands. A shiver traces its fingers the length of his spine.

"Android Angeles are the latest in sentient military technology. What we aim to do here has never before been achieved, but here we are, and does that not say something for our prospects?" Again the empty smile. "We believe that if these prototypes work well in the field, then in the future we could completely replace all other inferior military forces with this new equipment. Android Angeles is a series of humanoid machines programmed to fight enemy forces with superior speed, strength, and resilience, with greater capacity for knowledge and adaptation, while being free of such human hindrances as empathy and doubt. If they work, they will be the perfect soldiers. Our vulnerable human infantry could, in time, be completely removed in favour of these mechanical warriors, and then there would be no questioning our success." She raises an eyebrow. "If they work, of course."

Dean risks a sideways peek at Jo, and she glances back at him with an impressed raise of her eyebrows. He knows how she feels; his brain is currently an incoherent swirl of excitement and curiosity.

"Your role in this plan is the task of ensuring that the Androids function smoothly, and to then report any errors back to us," Naomi continues. "You'll be training with them for the next month or so, to ensure that you know how to work with them, and what to do if any should malfunction. After that point, you'll be going into the field with them, just like you would with any other new equipment. Treat them as you would treat, say, a new armoured vehicle. A sentient armoured vehicle resembling a human being that respond to voice commands, that is, but a vehicle all the same. A means to an end."

As she looks over her shoulder at the senior officers again, as though prompting one to take over from her, Dean's brain snags onto one phrase from the end of Naomi's speech: resembling a human being. He lifts his chin then and tries to peer past the row in front of him, to see towards the other side of the training room, where the parade that they passed on the way in is still stood, perfectly motionless. In fact, if Dean didn't know any better, he would say that none of them have moved at all in the past fifteen minutes.

Major Moseley steps forwards. "You'll all be briefed of the details of your landing mission, referred to here on in as Blue October, nearer to the time, so don't you worry about that for the time being," she says warmly. "Y'all just focus on your training for the next month. All the infantry and intelligence corps here will be assigned their own Android to work with, to learn how to use – those of you who are from the support corps, you won't have one specific assignment but will rather look after the welfare of the entire landing party, and you'll have your own task-specific training. Any questions?"

There are no questions asked. This is the point at which usually Dean would twist in his spot to look back towards Sam and pull a face or laugh at him for not being assigned his own robot, but he's still staring, transfixed, past the officers at the squad on the far side of the hall. There's no way that parade of soldiers can be what he thinks they might be.

Major Moseley calls on Captain Turner to come up to the front, then, with a list of names and serial numbers for which Android is assigned to which soldier. "Listen in," he calls, and then pauses for a second, glancing up from his sheet of paper, and adds, "and you might want to write these down. So – Lance Corporal Bradbury – Unit 8456-G-B-R-L." As they all rustle in their pockets for something to write with, he returns to the paper and continues reading. "Private Fitzgerald – Unit 4401-H-S-T-R. Corporal Harvelle – Unit 1558-A-N-N-A. Sergeant Henriksen – no unit assigned."

Captain Turner's voice washes over them, and since Dean knows that there are several more people still to go before his name is called, he takes the time to let his eyes move over each of the soldiers lined up some hundred feet away, in perfectly precise ranks. Men, women, of all shapes, sizes, and colours, all dressed in neat matching combats, a pale green colour beyond the usual colour system for soldiers of the U.S. Army – brown for infantry; navy for air corps; pewter grey for intelligence; sand for support units – and more than anything, it's the sight of that new green uniform which cements in Dean's mind the realisation that the squad are not human.

Dean tunes back into what's being said by Captain Turner as he catches him calling out, "Private Robinson – Unit 0797-V-R-G-L. Sergeant Talbot – Unit 2499-U-R-I-L. Private Tran – Unit 2392-I-N-I-S. Corporal Walker – no unit assigned." Dean gets his pen ready against his notepad. "Sergeant Winchester, D – Unit 5284-C-S-T-L. Doctor Winchester – no unit assigned." Captain Turner looks up at them all, and then across at Naomi Niehammer. "They gonna dress over and familiarise themselves with their assignments now, or what?"

Naomi nods, and with one more precise little smile, she leads them across the hall to the other squad. As they approach, whispers go up amongst the soldiers, growing into excited chatter as they get closer, and Dean feels Jo poke him between the shoulder-blades as they walk.

"I think I'm gonna name mine Humperdink," she whispers gleefully.

As they reach the second squad, the soldiers scatter to find their respective Android prototype. Dean starts in the first row and walks slowly along the ranks, his eyes on their chests to read the eight-digit serial numbers fixed to their chests, stamped on small metal plates which attach to their shirts.

Finally, Dean stops in front of his assignment. He lets his eyes flick up from the number-plate to the face above it, and finds himself face-to-face with the man – no – machine he'd made eye-contact with on the way in. He'd made eye-contact with a machine – there was no way any of this made sense, but somehow he was expected to believe it. Here is an android, roughly similar to Dean in height and weight, with neat dark hair, and wearing lazy stubble like he's in a dire need of a shave, except he isn't. He's designed like that, and Dean is unsettled by his own contemplation of whether or not it would feel real.

Unsure how to progress, Dean glances around at the rest of his company to try and see what they're doing. He can hear Garth chattering away excitedly, and somewhere beyond that, Victor's low, cautious tones, so he guesses that talking to him seems to be the way forwards.

He looks back at his own assignment, and clears his throat awkwardly. "Uh," he starts uncertainly. "Hello?"

The Android blinks.

Dean jerks back. He whips quickly sideways to see how the other androids are reacting to being addressed, and to his surprise, sees the majority of them interacting like human beings. Speaking when spoken to, using facial expressions and mannerisms that are weirdly normal – like people. Dean looks back and finds his own looking at him. Not staring vacantly in space, as he was before, but watching him carefully.

"Can you hear me?" Dean tries.

"I can hear you." His voice is low and rough, all unpolished edges.

Dean swallows. "Hey," he says. "My name's Sergeant Dean Winchester. You're gonna be training with me for the next few months, and then we'll be working together in the field after that."

"I'm aware."

"Oh, are you?" Dean exclaims, somewhere between sarcasm and genuine alarm, and he plasters a wide grin across his face as he tries to work out exactly how this task force is going to function, exactly, and how he's supposed to work with a robot which is more person than machine, and which, frankly, gives him all manner of heebie-jeebies. "That's good to know."

5284's eyes narrow. "You're uncomfortable," he states.

Dean laughs at that, and he glances away again briefly, partly to see how everyone else is dealing with their Android assignments, and partly as a cry for help because this isn't at all how he imagined robots would be and he's not sure what to do with it. "Uh," he says. "A little bit, yeah. Just – okay. How do you even work? Like, how much of you is machine and how much is a person?"

5284 stares at him. "I don't know." He pauses, mouth slightly open, and then he presses his lips together. "I could find out for you. If it would set you at ease."

Dean's face screws up a little as he considers the offer, but then he feels guilty, like he's forcing the Android to go to huge lengths just to help him get over himself. "No, it's okay, but thanks anyway," he says eventually, and it's only once the words have left his mouth that he realises how ridiculous this whole exchange is. He's talking to a machine. He might as well be thanking his goddamn stereo for doing its job, next. He glances away at the others one last time, and then back the Android almost immediately, irrationally paranoid that it will somehow have changed or moved – although it wouldn't be so crazy if it did change or move, since it's basically sentient, but it creeps him out all the same.

As he peers at the Android, contemplating its facial features and how they can possibly be constructed to so closely mimic those of a real human being, he is surprised by the Android sticking out one hand.

Dean stares at it like he expects it to bite. Then, idiotically, he just says, "What?"

The Android shifts the hand a little in mid-air, and moves it closer to Dean as he does so. His eyes flicker down to his hand, and then back up to Dean, as though prompting him.

Dean hesitantly reaches out and takes the Android's hand – and then they shake hands.

"Nice to meet you," the Android says, in that same dull, toneless voice in which all of his speech is delivered, but the handshake is firm, decisive. His hand lingers a little while longer in Dean's than is strictly necessary, but while their palms are pressed together, Dean's fingers curve over the back of the Android's hand, over his fingers and knuckle, and settle lightly at the heel of his hand, just before the sharp, bony juncture of his wrist. There is a fleeting drum there like a heartbeat, even if it's only vibrations.

  


They begin training immediately – they don't even get to break for lunch that day, much to Garth's disappointment – and from that point onwards, their entire schedule is re-organised to allow for their new mission.

They have to learn basic mechanics, in case something goes wrong with the Androids in the field when Gordon isn't nearby to fix it for them; they re-take their first aid class, but this time with the Androids sitting quietly beside them to make sure that they have all the same information; they take basic flight classes, so that in case of an emergency, they all have some fundamental knowledge of how to operate a simple transport ship, which is an opportunity that Dean enjoys, even if he's not particularly good at it, and Charlie laughs at him every time he crashes the simulator into the side of a mountain. The difficulty of their physical training is increased two-fold, as they will now have to carry the weight of the necessary equipment needed to maintain their Android; they have rigorous training sessions in a field simulator, where they spend days at a time going through hyper-realistic survival situations, wherein they could be under attack from an international enemy landing party, rebel Earth bands, or even just the natural challenges of existing on a planet that is now two-thirds barren wasteland.

Within a few days, the rest of their company is moved out to patrol on the planet's surface, and Dean's small squad is left behind; they have no time to complain or reminiscence, however, since they barely have time in their schedule to eat and sleep, between all their regular classes and their new training.

What Dean finds the weirdest of all, though, is simply the fact that in order to supposedly become accustomed to the presence of their new equipment, the Androids are around constantly. They accompany Dean's squad to every briefing, every class, every training session, even to the cafeteria and the rec room whenever they have any free time, although then they just stand around awkwardly, watching human interaction and waiting for the next movement. Thankfully, they don't share their partners' cabins, but instead they are shut away in a storage cupboard at the end of the hallway and turned onto standby, which Dean thinks is possibly even creepier than just having them in the same room. They sit with them while they eat, while they hang out; it's only by outright instruction that Kevin stops his from accompanying him to the bathroom. He 'wanted to learn about all parts of human behaviour', apparently. Right. Catch a sneaky glimpse of his dick, more like.

In the cafeteria, however, they are able to provide some entertainment, as they provide an outlet into deep philosophical thinking. One day, at lunchtime, Dean holds up his fork, complete with meatball impaled on the end, and waves it in front of 5284's face. "If you ate this," he asks, "what would happen?"

5284 stares at him. "Nothing."

Charlie snorts.

"But I mean, you can't digest it, right?" Dean crams the meatball whole into his mouth, and continues to talk around it. "So where does it go?"

"Where does anything ever go?" Kevin says in a low, solemn tone in mockery of deep contemplation. "We must all one day return to the abyss."

Jo elbows him in the stomach, and in turn, Sam throws the bitchiest look in his arsenal in Dean's direction. "Dean, if you don't stop talking with food in your mouth, I'm gonna stitch it closed," he tells him.

Dean makes a theatrical scene of chewing the meatball and swallowing it, and then focuses on 5284 again to press, "Well?"

5284 frowns a little, and after a moment's consideration, says, "I suppose it would go to the incinerator."

Dean's eyes widen. "Oh – right. Of course. Silly me – you don't have a stomach, you just have a freakin' furnace."

5284 squints at him. "Incinerator," he corrects.

"Yeah, Dean, get it right," Sam says.

Dean flips him off.

"Wait, so you guys can actually eat?" Jo asks her own Android, a willowy white woman with long red hair.

The redhead blinks placidly. "We don't need nutritional sustenance."

"So?" Victor exclaims. "Hell, I don't strictly need my own body weight in waffles, but sure as hell I wouldn't say no!"

"Victor," Cassie places a hand over Victor's and says with teasing solemnity, "you have a problem."

"They're just so goddamn fluffy—"

"Can you taste food, then?" Sam cuts in, looking across the table at where Jo and Kevin's Androids are sat.

Kevin's, one 2392-I-N-I-S, according to the serial number stamped on his chest, says, "We lack taste receptors."

"We are equipped with touch sensors, however" the redhead chips in again. "We do feel – textures, solidity – so we have some understanding of your food."

"Huh." Dean pulls a face. "Sounds delicious. More for me, I guess."

"More for you," 5284 agrees tonelessly, and he gives a curt nod to support the sentiment.

Dean eats another meatball.

On Tuesdays. lunch is immediately followed by weapons training – which the Androids are all irritatingly good at, even though Dean figures it's not really a surprise, since they are mechanically engineered super-soldiers, after all, who don't need to worry about stupid distracting things like breathe or balance or focus. With the exception of Cassie's prototype, whose aim is consistently a few degrees off to the left, there isn't a single Android who doesn't drop every target with a succession of bulls-eye shots.

At one point, though, 5284's pistol jams, and Dean can't help himself from saying gravely, "It happens to the best of us."

5284 doesn't grasp the condescension, and he simply thanks Dean for his concern, although he does also express in no uncertain terms that the fault lay with his weapon, and not with his handling of it.

Day after day, the squad is put through vivid field simulations in all conditions – rain, snow, blistering heat and sandstorms, and the occasional acidic thunderstorm which sends them all sprinting for cover as they battle with their gas masks. Sometimes the simulations last for several days, so that they have to dig into their programmed computer reality for the full experience of survival in the field.

This time, they've been inside the seemingly endless labyrinth of the simulator for two days already, traipsing across dry dirt and wheat grass as open and unforgiving as a blank page. A few hours ago, they had a brief run-in with a small reconnaissance patrol of Yemeni tanks, but have since found a small cluster of outlying suburban buildings as bare and dirty as broken teeth, through which they move slowly, carefully, in search of life, friendly or otherwise. They have drawn numbers for point, and as Cassie picked the number furthest from Kevin's decided fifty-three, she leads them through the dust. It's place like these where the stink of this war is strongest – where buildings and family homes are physically untouched by destruction, but abandoned for left-behind survivors to raid after the inhabitants escaped into space stations.

"Spread out," Victor urges in low tones as they scan through the first few houses, and they scatter into different rooms, garages, and one hollowed-out store across the road. They reunite in the town hall past the small mosque, and push swiftly through, room by room. As Cassie heads into one of the last meetings rooms on the lower floor, there is a sound like glass shattering, and then a deafening bang. Thick dark smoke and brightly-rushing flame roars up, and it swallows Cassie whole.

"Ah, shit," Cassie says, as a shrill noise is emitted from her simulator headset to let her know that she's dead.

The rest of the squad are already crashing in, swerving around her to clear the room with rifles pulled into their shoulders. Two men on the far side of the room, tucked behind an upturned conference table with the muzzle of a heavy machine-gun resting on the table edge in place of a tripod– someone takes them out cleanly, two sharp cracks of a round – one woman scrabbling on the floor for a fallen grease gun – Garth barks an order in Arabic, and she freezes where she is, hands lifted above her head – and one girl, maybe ten or eleven years old, who huddles low in the corner.

Victor glances around them all. "Everyone okay?"

"I think I got shot in the knee," Kevin says, and he looks down at where a bright red spot is frantically flashing on the leg of the simulator suit.

"Okay – Doc, see to him. Sergeant Talbot, take Bradbury and Walker up to check the attic. Fitzgerald, radio our coordinates in to the S-1 for prisoner transferral. The Androids can—" Victor hesitates and he frowns. "Uh. Check the bodies for survivors or intel. Harvelle! I want you with me to clear the back of the building."

"Yes, Sergeant."

They head out together. Sam carefully runs through his medical routine, even though there is nothing wrong with Kevin, and above them all are the sounds of Bela's footsteps on the floor above, and the danger is gone. Aside from Cassie's death, which was due to her own unfortunate negligence of a tripwire, the clearing was textbook. Dean heads over with the Androids to check the bodies of the men, and is just considering his rations pack and whether they'll be taking lunch in this simulated Yemeni village or actually going to the cafeteria upstairs, when he sees 5284 grab a fistful of the little girl's shirt, haul her upwards so that the tips of her toes barely scrape the ground, and level his pistol into her face.

"Stop!" Dean yells. "Don't – C- - C-S – for Christ's sake, stop!"

5284 slowly lifts his head and turns slowly to look at Dean. He doesn't relinquish his grip on the girl, and he doesn't lower his weapon. "Sergeant," he says. As ever, his voice is low, calm, and respectful.

"Put her down," Dean tells him. He becomes distantly aware that the rest of his team has also frozen in place, and are now staring at him.

5284 makes no move to do as he's told.

"Now," Dean says.

5284's eyes flash from Dean to the team behind him – to the rest of Dean's squad, and to the other Androids. "I have contradictory orders," he says at last.

"Contradictory orders?" Dean repeats incredulously. "Bullshit. These are your orders: put her the fuck down." 5284 doesn't, and with a rush of anger, Dean notes to himself one malfunction of the Androids – they don't fucking listen. "What, are you deaf? Let her go. She's a civilian."

"She's enemy," 5284 states bluntly, as though reading from a manifesto.

Dean exhales sharply. "She's like twelve years old, dude. She's not the enemy here."

"Twelve-year-olds will age. She'll know anger, later."

"You're gonna know anger in a second if you don't let her go," Dean threatens, and as the last of his patience snaps, he lifts his own pistol and aims it at 5284's head. He knows that it's not a real weapon, and that it won't actually do anything, but the implication that he would act similarly in the field, in a real battle scenario, is there as well, and he's not fucking around anymore. "Do I have to call a time-out here, or are you gonna put her down?"

5284 turns back to face the girl, who hangs limp from his hand, as it seems that the possibility of the civilian casualty being attacked was not something that the simulator had programmed its character to expect, and he slowly lowers his pistol. Then he releases her unceremoniously. When her feet hit the ground, she stumbles and nearly falls, but then she jolts back into her normal programme and skitters away around a corner, crying as she goes.

"Thank you," Dean says in the bitchiest tone he can muster, and they proceed.

Once the town hall is empty, the bodies searched, weapons commandeered, and all other trip-wires disabled, and once the surrounding area has been cleared by Victor and Jo, the squad moves out along the main road again. It's a long dusty thing cut straight through the dry grass and decaying old farmhouses, until the hard yellow of the baked dirt slowly gives way to an aching red sand like brick dust. They haven't reached the aching sands, however – haven't even reached the last of the farmhouses at the town's edge – when from around the corner of a lopsided old barn comes two small trucks, decorated with impromptu armour in the form of thick slabs of wood, accompanied by a small group of ragged men and women toting rifles. At their forefront is the little girl that Dean had demanded 5284 release. She points at them and chatters in rapid Arabic.

"Well, great," Jo says flatly.

Garth calls something across to them but he hasn't even finished his sentence before a chatter of rounds tears towards them and they're forced back into cover.

From behind a low stone wall Victor gives his orders – Bela to set up light artillery launchers with her Android, the rest of them giving suppressive fire from wherever they can – as the thunder of gunfire continues to rumble over their heads and all around them. However, it seems that the Androids have alternate ideas about how best to take cover; 5284 stands up, braced against the wall with one hand and the hand-guard of his rifle locked into the stone for support, and Garth's Android, one tall blonde female identified by her badge as 4401-H-S-T-R, kneels in the middle of the road, wide open to the incoming rounds as she fires back. They fire in short, clean bursts that neatly take out one rebel at a time, without hesitation.

Bela and her prototype work together to swiftly assemble the folding mortar stands. Once it's complete, she drops a shell in each. There's a hollow clank of metal on metal, and the launchers spit out their shells, and she screams out a warning for them all to take cover. The Androids don't flinch.

As Dean hauls himself up to his feet from the base of the narrow doorway into which he'd thrown himself, he catches sight of the Androids moving dimly through the smoke as silhouettes. Even as there are still a handful of bullets cutting persistently through the dust and fire, they stride calmly forwards, weapons raised.

There are three sharp cracks, and then there is silence.

Dean emerges from cover tentatively, knees loosely bent so that he can duck out of sight at a moment's notice, but at the moment there is no need. The smoke clears, moving upwards in a thick, lazy spiral, and the sun falls faintly orange over the crumpled bodies of the Yemeni survival militia – all dead except one man who gasps for air as blood spurts feebly out of a hole in his chest – just the one man, and the little girl.

Dean says nothing as the Androids approach the survivors, nor does he speak up as 5284 walks calmly up to the bleeding man, pulls up his rifle, and puts a round clean in the centre of the man's forehead. The rest of the squad seem to be in a similar state of shock; they have all risen to their feet, their weapons forgotten in their hands and at their sides as they watch the Androids work. This is the first simulation that they've been put through where there has been any question of personal morality, and where the NCOs would've come together to debate and discuss and at long last decide what was to be done, the Androids have moved straight ahead without a moment's thought as to what they were doing. Dean doesn't know how to respond.

5284 crosses to the girl, then, and in an instant, Dean knows what's going to happen. 5284 lifts his rifle again, and Dean yells, "Don't—"

The shot rings out with an echo, and the girl slumps into the dust.

5284 turns and meets Dean's eyes.

The simulator cuts out.

Dean takes a deep, slow breath to steady himself. "What the fuck was that?"

5284's voice comes emotionlessly through a darkness that is only broken by the infrequent red flashing mitted by Kevin and Cassie's simulator suit casualties. "You disapprove, still."

"Of course I disapprove," Dean starts angrily. "That girl was just—"

"An enemy informant," 5284 says.

"A child," Victor interrupts. The lights flicker on in long, fluorescent strips, revealing not the Yemeni savannah, but an enormous, sterile training room. "I'm sorry. You all seem to be under the impression that you're following someone else's orders – someone whose orders over-ride mine. Let me clear that up for you." He takes three steps forwards to where the majority of the Androids are gathered, addressing them all, but it is 5284 he approaches directly. "I am squad IC. Sergeant Winchester is squad 2IC. All decisions go through me, and before that, through Winchester, and if you're still not quite sure, through the other NCOs first. You have no authority here. You are the lowest common denominators of this force," he snaps out through gritted teeth, and he glares around at each of them individually. "To summarise: if you aren't certain? Youdon't make a decision. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"

5284's eyes move slowly across the squad as they stand, sweaty and tired with matching disgruntled expressions, and then at last he comes to rest on Dean.

For a moment, there is silence. Then 4401-H-S-T-R speaks up. "We were certain."

  


The troops of the Blue October task force are put through several sessions working on dummies to ensure that the troops of the Blue October task force have enough basic understanding of how the Androids work to be able to perform small repairs without damaging them. The dummies are also products of Niehammer Corporations, dimly sentient enough that they fidget and move like a person, and to be honest, it's getting on Dean's last nerve.

"Will you fucking sit still?" Dean snaps at it, and beside him, Sam snickers into the back of his hand before swallowing his laughter down and hastily composing his face into something very solemn when Dean shoots a glare at him.

As part of the force's support team, Sam doesn't have his own Android, and so doesn't really need to attend these sessions, but he had figured that he might as well come along just in case something went drastically wrong and he ended up needing to help somehow. "Uh, you need a hand?" he offers, unhelpfully, since he knows that Dean won't accept his help and that the offer itself is a form of mockery.

"No," Dean retorts. "I'm fine. It's just – Jesus Christ, why is this—" the dummy jerks violently in his hands and the screwdriver gets knocked out of his hand to be sent flying across the floor of the training hall. Dean swears under his breath some more, just for good measure, and glances over his shoulder to see if anyone else saw that before he sneaks off to surreptitiously retrieve his screwdriver.

"You okay there, Winchester?" Jo asks cheerfully.

"Fine," Dean barks, flushing red up from the colour, and stomps back to his own desk. He sits heavily back onto his stool and points the screwdriver threateningly at Sam. "You laugh again, and this is going in your eye."

Sam holds his hands up in surrender. "I'd never dream of it."

Still grumbling to himself, Dean gets back to work. "When they said we were gonna learn to fix robots, I thought it'd be a little more like working on an engine… not changing a goddamn diaper," he mutters. "Alright – done. What's next on the list?"

Sam snorts. "When's the last time you changed a diaper, anyway?" He reaches over to the other side of the desk for the laminated sheet of paper everyone had been given, which details all the tests they should be running through with their dummies to ensure optimum operating, and he trails the tip of his finger over what they've done so far. "Uh… tracking chip. We gotta check it's still feeding back to wherever. Tracking, and stuff."

"Okay." Dean stares down at the dummy. "And where is that? And trust me, you don't want to know the last time I had to deal with diapers." With his eyes still fixed on the dummy and his expression set in a kind of distracted state of dismay, he goes on, "There was this girl, and I swear to God, she was into some—"

"You're right, I don't want to know," Sam cuts across him loudly. He lifts his eyebrows high like he's already seen something traumatising, and huffs his breath out in a short burst as though to dispel the memory. "Right. Tracking chip – Gordon said it was inside the elbow, I think? On the left arm."

Dean pulls a face. "Ew." He gets down to work, though – finding the near-invisible seam of the dummy's synthesised skin and carefully peeling it back to expose the smooth metal and translucent black plastic underneath, where under the surface there are a series of dimly flashing lights. Still grimacing a little, Dean peels the skin back far enough that he can peek down towards the crook of the dummy's elbow. "Yeah, that baby's really in there."

"Is it lit up, though?" Sam asks.

"I dunno. It's flashing. Is that what it's meant to do?"

"No, it doesn't flash, it just – dude, are you sure you're even looking at the right thing?"

"Of course I'm sure, dickwad, it's—"

"Inside of the elbow, like in the meaty part – not on the hinge?"

"Oh. Huh. Then what the fuck is this?"

Together Sam and Dean peer into the dark space underneath the dummy's fake skin, in equal bewilderment, as they try to work out whether they're seeing what they're supposed to be seeing.

"Maybe try poking it?"

"You poke it, then."

"No way, you're the one who's meant to be—"

"It's not gonna bite, Sam, it's just a chunk of—"

"Then why don't you—"

A long shadow falls over them, and there is the sound of someone clearing their throat. "Is there a problem, boys?" Captain Singer asks.

Sam and Dean's heads snap up with identical expressions of perfect innocence as they exclaim their no no sir of course not everything is going just fine's, and then, in spite of still being buried wrist-deep in a loose flap of synthesised skin, Dean beams up at Captain Singer to prove that everything is going according to plan.

Captain Singer eyes them suspiciously as though waiting for either of them to do something that will give him an excuse to tell them off for being idiots, but before he has the opportunity, one of the other officers – a tall, sharp-boned woman from the engineer's department, named Second Lieutenant Barnes – calls out to the rest of them that their time is up.

"Everyone pack up your dummies into their carry bags and leave them in orderly stacks along the wall, and bring your filled-out checklists to me," she tells them all, and Dean doesn't waste any time giving up on trying to find the tracking chip.

They stow all their equipment, hand back in their paperwork, and as they file out into the hallway, once dismissed, they all break into muttering all the complaints they hadn't been able to voice during the session for fear of getting their asses kicked by Lieutenant Barnes.

"What the fuck just happened?" Dean exclaims. "What was that – did anyone get anything from that? Am I the only who feels like they just spent an hour molesting a human fleshlight?"

Charlie snorts derisively.

"You would know how that feels, wouldn't you?" Bela says, and she arches her eyebrows at him.

"Shut up – you know what I mean."

"Maybe if you'd actually been paying attention during the original briefing, you'd have had more luck," Gordon tells Dean.

"Bullshit," Jo says, and she jabs an index finger at him, one fist balanced on her hip. "I was paying attention – took notes and everything – and I felt like I was trying to birth a goddamned baby cow half the time. Those dummies are weird as shit."

"So on one hand, we have fleshlights, and on the other, birthing a calf," Cassie says slowly, and she puts both her hands out flat in front of her and tips them up and down as though weighing something up on a pair of scales. "There's a joke in there somewhere about lesbians but I… I just can't find it."

"You're clearly not trying hard enough," Charlie grins.

Dean laughs, rocking back on his heels with it, but as he does, he catches sight of movement at the end of the hall, and as he turns to look, his smile slides into a grimace. He twists back to the face others and mutters a warning: "Heads up – here comes the A-Team."

From the other end of the hall come the Androids, striding out with their usual stiff grace while almost in step, like they're a few slow-motion frames away from a cinematic entrance with explosions at their backs. 5284 is just back of the forefront, behind the redheaded woman and Bela's bald one, and when he catches Dean's eyes he inclines his chin a little to acknowledge having seen him.

"Hey, my man, how's it hanging?" Dean asks 5284 when he comes to a halt in front of him – partly just to fuck with him, because the Android never seems to know how to respond – and he grins when 5284 just squints at him. "Never mind."

The rest of the Androids slowly filter into the group to find their own partners, their voices lifted in their usual empty greetings - including Cassie's, a tall man with slicked-back dark hair and a permanently unhappy face, whose metal name-plate identifies him as 0797-V-R-G-L, and who is for some reason currently speaking to her in a foreign language. "Entschuldigen Sie," he says tonelessly, over and over. "Ich scheine nicht ganz richtig zu funktionieren, aber das sollte gleich behoben sein. Bitte warten Sie."

Cassie glances around wildly. "What the hell is –Garth? What's he saying?"

"Bitte warten Sie. Bitte warten Sie." The Android blinks fast, eyes unfocused on anything in front of him as he speaks, and repeats the same unfamiliar words until Gordon comes pushing through the group.

"Excuse me – coming through, get out of the way," he grunts, and once he reaches the Android he runs an irritated look over everyone still watching the scene unfold, so the others all obediently turn away and return their own conversations while Gordon works his magic on the faulty equipment.

Dean swivels back to face the other way. "What's up with that?" he asks.

"Linguistics malfunction," 5284 replies, still watching Gordon and the Android with detached interest. "He's just going through Android protocol to inform your colleague of a problem – wherein the problem lies, because unfortunately, it's in German."

Sam frowns. "Weird," he says. "Where'd you all go, anyway?"

"Yeah, you should've stuck around," Dean tells him, and his mouth splits into a shit-eating grin. "It was just awesome - I spent an hour learning how to most effectively fist your elbow."

While Sam makes a sound like he's trying not to choke on his own spit, Charlie raises her eyebrows and deadpans, "Fun for all the family."

5284 looks at them through suspiciously narrowed eyes, but either he doesn't have an appropriate response handy in his database or he doesn't know what's been said to him, because he stays silent, and instead Charlie's Android, a short, stocky male stamped with 8456-G-B-R-L, opts to answer Sam, saying, "We were down in the engineer's transport bay for fuel replenishment, and then Doctor Niehammer wanted us in her office to check our progress."

Sam's mouth turns downwards and he bobs his head in a satisfied kind of way. "Fair enough."

However, Dean is still staring at them. "Fuel replenishment?" he repeats incredulously. "Why the hell did you need fuel replenishment?"

5284 blinks at him. "We were low on fuel," he says, slowly, as though he's worried that there's something wrong with Dean's hearing or ability to understanding English.

"Low on fuel – Jesus." Dean snorts. "I thought you were meant to be more like a tank, not a freakin' Ford Fiesta."

"I don't—" 5284 frowns. "What — I don't—"

Dean slaps him on the shoulder. "Don't hurt yourself, champ," he says, his voice a warm, condescending mockery of reassurance. "You might run out of fuel or something."

  


The time to move out comes faster than any of them anticipated. Just five weeks after they were first briefed, the squad is being called into Major Moseley's office to be detailed on their landing mission. It's just coming up to midnight when they're summoned; Sam arrives with his undershirt on backwards and Charlie stands unabashedly barefoot in her pyjamas. Luckily Dean had been in the gym rather than in bed – he's painfully aware that the weight of their equipment on this mission will be roughly double their usual, and that as 2IC, he will be expected to shoulder more than everyone else.

Now they all stand in front of Missouri's desk, a mismatched band of soldiers, both human and machine, without an officer between them. The Androids are, as always, immaculately presented in their starched green dress uniform, solemn as a threnody. And early, of course – when Dean had come jogging in, still damp from the shower, and just thirty seconds past the official meeting time, 5284 had turned to watch him with that typically cool, lofty look which just flirts with being outright disdainful. Dean knows it would be inappropriate to tell him to fuck off in front of Major Moseley, especially when he hasn't technically done anything wrong, but it doesn't stop him from thinking it.

Luckily, Major Moseley is still working through her paperwork, her pen a dull scratch against the desktop, and so the squad stands waiting. In the lull, Dean glances around the rest of his team, checking out of bored curiosity to see if everyone is here – and he spots someone he's never met before: some skinny blonde kid who doesn't even look old enough to qualify for the Allied Armed Forces, except he's dressed in the same green combats as the rest of the Androids, and his chest is stamped with 3737-S-M-D-L.

Dean frowns, and he lets his eyes flit across the rest of his team, just to check that there aren't any more surprises, or even to see if he can source where this new addition has come from. Bela catches his eye and raises one eyebrow, and when he casts her a bewildered look and jerks his head in the direction of the newcomer, she mouths at him, Cassie's new Android. Dean looks around again and realises that Cassie's old Android – the tall, unhappy-looking one who spontaneously devolved into German the other day – is gone. Huh.

Major Moseley clears her throat loudly, and Dean snaps back around to face the front. "I'm sorry if I disturbed you," she begins, popping her pen back into a small plastic pot on her desk. She clasps her hands together on top of her desk and surveys them all with a warm, sympathetic look. "As you must already know by now, the rest of your company have returned from tour as of this afternoon, and surely you understand the need for secrecy regarding Blue October. I trust none of you have discussed your task with your peers?"

They all shake their heads, except for Bela's, one 2499-U-R-I-L, who helpfully contributes, "I have no peers."

Dean rolls his eyes, and he hears Jo stifle a laugh behind him. Then he sees a strange expression cross 5284's face – something impatient, his eyebrows pulling together, like irritation. Major Moseley ignores the interruption anyway, and she continues before Dean has time to think about what that expression means.

"You've been working with your Android prototypes for over a month now, and acclimatising to simulated earth conditions more recently, so all you should have to do now to be ready is pack," she says firmly, "and you'll be packing tonight. Reveille will be at oh-six-hundred, with breakfast at oh-seven-thirty – so there's plenty of time for admin in between the two. Down at the armoury for weapons collection at oh-eight-hundred. Oh-nine-hundred for a pre-departure briefing in the docking bay, and then you'll be setting out immediately afterwards. Estimated travel time is ten hours, so you should be arriving just before sundown." She turns to address Victor directly. "Make sure they all synchronise their watches and test the functions of their combat suits – tonight."

"Yes, ma'am," Victor says.

"You'll be landing on American soil—"

Dean's eyes open wide, and he glances quickly over his shoulder in search of Sam; they make fleeting eye contact, a split-second of holy shit, and then Dean swivels back to face the front as Missouri goes on.

"—in Utah – longitude approximately thirty-eight degrees north, latitude one-hundred and eleven degrees west – some seventy miles west of the border with Colorado, at the south-eastern tip of the Colorado Plateau." Spread out across her desk is a map of the former United States of America. Thick red lines in permanent marker sketch out where land has been taken from them. There are a lot of red lines. "Since the hit on Detroit, there's been this on-going international free-for-all for the mid-western states. At the moment, everything from Illinois to the radiation line is controlled by China, and we've got Mexicans pushing up to take back any land they can. You know the deal – value of money's dropping, and what sells now is the physical: land, crops, natural resources." She ticks them off her fingers, and with a short sigh, flicks her hands out as though dispelling all of the above as far from her as she can. "In short, it's bedlam, and with most of our troops occupying the Middle East and northern Africa, we don't have the strength to push them back. The Chinese have been trying to push into Colorado for the past six months and will be trying to get through it into Utah. Now I'm not expecting y'all to defend the whole damn state or hold the mountains – you'll be a recon patrol, measuring their forces, testing their limits – and you'll also be taking with you some small, high-tech field cameras to be set up so that we can monitor the area in the future." She claps her hands together over the map. "Bear in mind that a considerable part of your task is just field-testing the Android Angeles. Don't get them destroyed, and you sure as hell better not let the enemy get them." She pauses for a beat and then adds, as an afterthought, "Don't get killed, either. Because then Doctor Niehammer won't get any feedback. You look after them, Winchester."

Sam gives a short laugh. "Will do, ma'am."

Major Moseley sits up straighter, rubbing her hands together, and she opens her mouth to dismiss them, only Charlie raises her hand. Missouri nods at her. "Corporal?"

"If there was a problem with one of the Androids, what would we do?"

"Radio it in to the nearest Allied ship or satellite, with your coordinates, and wait to be met," Missouri says.

"And…" Charlie hesitates. "What would happen to them, once they'd been reported?"

Major Moseley looks at Gordon. "Corporal Walker?"

"The faulty machine would be taken back to the labs and reset, probably," he tells them all. "Worst case scenario, the Android would have to be shut down."

Charlie's face falls. "Oh. Okay." She flashes a quick, uneasy smile at Major Moseley to thank her for her answers, and then looks down at her feet.

Dean guesses he knows in no uncertain terms what happened to Cassie's old Android now.

"Alright. Any other questions?" Missouri prompts.

With a few exchanged glances, the squad responds in the negative, and even though half of them are in various states of undress, they stand to attention to be dismissed. "I'll see you in the morning." Missouri tilts her chin upwards to look each one of them in the face, in turn, and wishes them good luck before she lets them head out.

As soon as they break out into the hallway, they turn to each other with all whispers running over each other until their voices all jumble together into one quiet cacophony of excitement, while the Androids hover awkwardly behind them and wait for their next move.

"When's the last time we even went back to America?" Victor exclaims.

"Me? Never," Charlie says, but her face is a bright slash of a grin. "You wanna talk to me about Israel and Russia, go for it – but America, jeez – remind me what that's even like, again?"

"One word, y'all," Garth cuts across them all, and he holds his hands up in front of him to indicate to all that what he's about to say is very, very important: "Burger King."

Dean bursts out laughing. "Yes."

"Dude, McDonald's," Jo reprimands him with a shove to his shoulder. "You heathen."

"They won't even be open anymore," Bela says flatly. "Trust me, they'll be all locked up and dusty. No burgers, even if—"

"I've never even been back to Earth," Kevin says, a little breathless with the anticipation of it. "I only even qualified for landing missions three months ago – since I got up here I've never been back."

Charlie gapes at him. "No way."

Kevin shrugs, his teeth bared in an awkward almost-smile. "Yup – never. Until now, I guess!"

Dean claps him hard on the shoulder with a broad, easy grin. "Hold onto your pants, kid," he tells him. "You're gonna be back there in a whole big way soon."

There comes a clattering sound from inside Major Moseley's office, followed by the indistinct outline of a small fist rapping hard on the fogged-glass window. "Y'all best not be loitering outside my office in the middle of the night," she calls irritably from within, and the squad hurry away down the hall before they can get their asses properly handed to them.

The hallways are long and sterile, both the floor and walls a dull, dark metal that squeaks plaintively under contact, while the ceiling is entirely covered with harsh fluorescent lights that run in thick strips like runway lamps, and which occasionally flicker, casting witchy shadows that run abstractly the length of the hall like a fleeing form until the next corner or pair of sliding doors. Dean and Sam walk in step, already deep in a discussion about whether or not the weather in Utah at this time of year would totally suck; 5284 walks a little behind.

"America," 5284 says, out of nowhere, his voice echoing against all the hard spaces, and the low timbre of his speech, reverberating along the hallway, cuts straight through their conversation, so Dean and Sam shut up abruptly and twist back to look at him. His brow is furrowed into deep lines. "It's… important to you."

Dean and Sam exchange a look of confusion. Dean lifts his eyebrows at Sam, then, to indicate that Sam should take this one. Sam frowns – no way, man, he's your stupid Android – and Dean narrows his eyes - do it or I swear to god – and Sam opens his eyes wide – look, man, I'm not fucking doing it – and so Dean rolls his eyes, shoots Sam a death-glare, and answers.

"Well, yeah," he starts. "I mean… aside from Bela, America was home for us all. It was kind of a part of us, and – then it wasn't. You know?" He looks across at 5284 uncertainly, not sure that he can express himself any better than that if 5284 doesn't understand yet.

5284's frown has relaxed a little, although there are still traces of it scrunched into dim lines at the tip of his nose. "You feel that part of you is missing, now," he says – phrases it like a statement, but then looks at Dean for confirmation.

Dean shrugs. "Yeah, I guess." He reaches to the wall beside him as they round a corner and drums his fingertips idly on it, an uneven rhythm that vibrates faintly through the whole space and then grows still. He glances at 5284 again. "You ever feel like that?"

"No," 5284 says bluntly, and his eyes narrow as though he's considering the prospect. Then he hesitates, his mouth falling slightly open in the lapse between words, and goes on, "What's Earth like?"

Sam just grins at him. "Wait and see."

  


Daybreak. Sam's already awake, early bird that he is, and he tosses a pillow at Dean's head to get him moving. "Rise and shine, princess," he sings in an obnoxious falsetto as he stands in front of the mirror to pill his ridiculous hair back into the stubby ponytail demanded of him by the medical profession.

"I hate you," Dean grumbles, but he does drag himself into action. His pack is waiting ready at the foot of his bed, his black synthetic combat suit slung over the back of a chair; his boots are open-mouthed and unlaced by the wardrobe.

The rest of their old company are already busy at the day's duties, so Dean and Sam head unseen from their barracks towards the elevator down to drop off their packs. They go via the storage cupboard at the end of the wing where the Androids are being kept on stand-by during the night, Dean rapping out an obnoxious tattoo on the metal door with both fists as Sam opens the door with the obligatory, "Android Angeles – power up for duty!" to get them all conscious again for action.

The morning is chaos – zeroing and re-zeroing their weapons, checking that they have all their equipment, Garth practicing his Spanish loudly and constantly, Charlie and Gordon chatting to the pilots and ship maintenance workers about the transport ship they'll be going on; there comes the loading of the ship, and of course the essential squabbling fights between Dean and Sam to each try and get the other beyond the barriers restricting access to the sonic engines, where the fumes will turn their voices to a high-pitched, unintelligible squeak and possibly also get them high. By this stage, it's almost tradition – Dean and Sam have never been on separate missions and take the opportunity every time it is presented to them before take-off – but it doesn't mean that Bela doesn't yell at them for it. Their fun and games come to a halt, though, when the transport ship they'll be loaded onto suddenly punches its rear loading lights on – four individual lamps each as harsh and dazzling as a floodlight, bright enough to temporarily burn a hole into each of Dean's retinas, and definitely enough to stop him and Sam from fucking around, in order to preserve their eyesight at very least.

From then on, seemingly out of nowhere, there is an abrupt shift to organised troop movement.

The sun is a blinding yellow glint across the surface of the glass in the airlock, its rays distorted by the two doors so that it creates a soft, romantic glow all across the hard steel of the hangar, and then they're silhouettes against it as they mount the metal-grille steps up into the low passenger underbelly of the ship. They take their seats; strap in, over the belly and across the chest, legs temporarily strapped into soft Velcro braces to keep them steady at take-off.

As they sit and wait for the doors to be sealed, Kevin pipes up with, "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with—"

"Space," everyone else answers.

Kevin giggles to himself, and while Bela relates out loud her concern as to whether Kevin will ever get bored of that joke, Dean glances over to his left, past Jo, to look out of the series of narrow windows which for now only reveal the landing bay. Instead, he finds 5284 staring at him curiously from the seat on the far side of Jo. "What—?" he starts.

"Huh? You mean I Spy? It's a game," Dean tells him, as he guesses the reason for his confusion. "For human kids. You start with 'I spy with my little eye…' and then you say the first letter of the thing that you're looking at, and everyone else has to look around and guess what it is."

"Oh." 5284 frowns. "And – space?"

Dean laughs. "There's a hell of a lot of space out here, dude. Check your database."

5284 doesn't answer that. There's a screech of metal as the steps up to the ship drop away, and then the engine comes to life with a roar that rattles every bone in Dean's body, and 5284 looks away out the window. As the ship cruises lazily into the airlock, the sun chases them from window to window, flickering off and on their faces unevenly. The light catches on their skin to give them all a golden hue – turning 5284's eyelashes brassy where they lighten at the ends, emphasising the solemn crease of his brow, the moue of his quiet mouth. Dean looks away, past 5284, to the window again, waiting for that split-second thrill when the ship drops into stomach-crushing free-fall in order to break out of the gravity field, before the absolute nothingness of space catches them. In that yellow light, the entire squad is for once silent, and they wait and hold their breath and then, at last, they fall into darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing they see of Earth as they touch-down is the dust through the windows: red, swirling in thick tornadoes as the engines roar close to the ground. There isn't much else to see – rocks, the occasional clump of dry, pale grass – but Dean fidgets impatiently in his seat to get going. Ten hours is one hell of a long journey, and although he's done it half a thousand times, and although they did all have the whole passenger bay to wander around and entertain themselves in, with the exception of the last hour of descent, he's itching to get his feet on land. Actual land, that is – with dirt and grass and insects, unlike the sterile metal and glass of the U.S. military base, some two-thousand miles from the real deal.

Overhead, there is a buzz and a crack from the intercom, and then a female voice comes through. "Evening, ladies and gents, this is your pilot speaking. My name is Warrant Officer Jody Mills and I'm going to be your link to home for the next few months. Anything you need – be it a medical evac, or a prisoner transferral, or equipment and sustainability replens… or hell, even just for a chat! Tell me about your day! If you're not busy, that is. Eyes on the prize, firstly." The woman clears her throat. "I'll be in orbit, then. If you radio in on channel 3-B on your comms, I'll get it transferred from the nearest Allied satellite and I'll be with you within twenty-four hours. Don't worry – I've got your backs."

It's a nice sentiment, even if it is an unusual, and gratuitously emotional one; what few nerves Dean had skittering along the walls of his stomach like teenage assholes at a skate-park are reassured by it. He doesn't hitch his breath in and hold it with nervous anticipation of touch-down, like he normal does. He just breathes easy, and waits for the ship to rock down onto its supports and settle.

"Alrighty, then," Warrant Officer Mills' voice comes through again, cheerful as the daylight. "Welcome to Utah. Everyone off ! And remember – channel 3-B. I'll be listening."

They call out their thank-you's and see-you-later's as they unbuckle from their seats and head across to the enormous metal lockers where they stashed their webbing and shut their rifles into secure Plexiglas cases, and then they descend the metal steps into bright sunlight.

Dean follows 5284 down, each step ringing noisily as his boots strike steel, but when 5284 steps off onto the ground, he doesn't turn back towards the cargo underbelly of the ship to collect the rest of his equipment as everyone else does; he wanders slowly away, each foot placed carefully like he isn't sure that the dirt can support his weight, and then he stops a couple yards away from the ship and does not move.

Dean crosses to join him and find out what he's doing, but when he reaches 5284, he just finds him staring out into the distance. Dean comes to rest beside him, and the two of them gaze off into the distance, where the dust swirls in small red tornadoes and the land stretches hard and barren as far as the eye can see, until the edge of the earth and the faint semi-circle of the sun making its dim yellow struggle above a horizon which cuts it in half as neatly as soft butter.

"It's something, isn't it," Dean comments, for lack of anything better to say, and he shields his eyes against the light and the dust with one hand as he looks out.

"What is that?" 5284 asks.

Dean glances over at him and finds 5284 squinting away across the dirt, the same as Dean was, but the focus of his eyes are somewhere else. "What's what?" Dean asks him, and 5284 lifts one steady hand to point.

As Dean follows the direction of 5284's finger, he realises what he's referring to, and he looks back at 5284 with a surprised laugh. "What, you've never seen a sunset before?"

5284 doesn't answer the question. Instead he says quietly, "Sunset," as though to himself and then goes on, as though in a trance, "The daily disappearance of the sun below an azimuth greater than one-hundred-eighty degrees as the result of Earth's rotation."

Dean nods. "Yep. That's the one."

For a moment they both stare out at it together: the sun pale against a sky that is all misty, washed out grey-blue until the horizon, where it begins to bleed in soft pinks, lilac at the edges like a bruise, rust-coloured underneath.

"It's not how I imagined it," 5284 says abruptly.

Dean drops his hand from his face and looks across at 5284 again, but this time 5284 doesn't meet his eyes; he stays turned out towards the sunset, his eyebrows pulled together as though in deep contemplation, except that wouldn't make sense. "You imagined it?" Dean says incredulously, because that doesn't make sense either, but here 5284 is.

"I thought everything would be more… mechanical," 5284says finally, with a soft decisiveness to his tone, as though he had not quite been able to wrap his head around what exactly it was here that was different to his imaginings, but that he has now come to a conclusion he wants to stick with.

Dean shakes his head and looks out beyond the dirt again. "Didn't we all."

Somewhere behind them is the clatter of equipment being unpacked and Dean knows that any second now he's going to have break away from this little hush to get work done, to lift heavy weights and weaponry for a long trek through the desert and the darkness – but for now he's content in this moment, just to stand here and breathe.

It doesn't last forever. Within ten minutes, the ship's engines roar again, whipping their hair and combat suit collars back against their faces, and it lifts slowly into the crisp evening air like an enormous, dull-skinned beetle. The squad doesn't wait around to watch it go and wave goodbye; they shoulder their packs, adjust the straps across their bodies for comfort, and set off steadfastly into the lessening light. They need to get as far as possible through Utah towards their destination before sunrise, when travel will be slower in the thick July heat and the chance of being seen by enemy satellites or outlying patrols will be greater.

They walk briskly across the sparse clumps of grass and cracked dirt, one in front of the other in a loose crocodile file in case of hidden obstacles when it gets darker; Dean walks just behind Sam, with 5284 several paces to his rear. It's the same as the beginning of every mission in that at first everyone takes it very seriously – using correct patrol tactics, walking in absolute silence, checking their arcs regularly – but after an hour or so of walking, once the sun has dropped below the horizon and left them in a dim indigo twilight which is neither light enough to hold onto the last of the sun's rays nor dark enough to allow for stars, they loosen up a little.

"Did any of you take a dump on the transport?" Garth asks conversationally as they walk.

"No," says Cassie. "Why – did the bathroom stink? Because I'm not pointing fingers but Sam had a bean burrito before we took off."

Sam makes a loud splutter of protest.

"No, not that. I just forgot to go and I wish I had," Garth says, and his voice takes on a wistful tone.

"By all means, Garth, drop a deuce. We won't let the coyotes eat you," Victor calls from somewhere near the front of the line.

"Thanks, man – good to hear I have your support."

Victor laughs. "I'm here for you."

"Maybe you can shit on the move," Dean offers helpfully. "You know – just squeeze one out as you walk. Shake it out of your pants later. We won't tell anyone."

"We've got your back," Jo chips in.

There's a momentary pause and then 5284's voice comes up from behind Dean. "That would be exceedingly difficult. Bordering impossible."

Dean frowns. "What?"

"The human rectum has not evolved to be utilised from the standing position – unless, of course, Garth has been consuming large quantities of hard fibres, in which case—"

"Shut up, dude," Dean groans. "No 0ne's actually gonna shit their goddamn pants."

Another pause, and God, Dean can just imagine the bewildered scowl that will be currently creasing up 5284's brow. "Then I misunderstood. Did you—?"

"It was a joke," Dean says, slowly, with careful emphasis.

"A joke," 5284 echoes.

"Like this – okay." Sam takes a deep breath as he considers his options. "So. What's brown and sticky?"

Dean snorts – he knows this one – and he twists to peer over his shoulder, past the enormous bulk of his pack, and he finds 5284 squinting so hard that Dean can hardly believe he can see where he's going. "Based on the conversation so far, I would assume—"

"A stick," Sam finishes, and Charlie guffaws loudly from the front, emitting a sound like a sea lion's mating call.

"I see," 5284 says.

Dean sighs. "No, you don't."

"I do," 5284 insists. "It's a statement of fact pertaining to levels of sap residue on—"

"It's a joke," Dean repeats. "Forget it."

Dean hears Sam's wheezy attempt to suppress his own laugh, and so Dean kicks out the back of his knee so that his leg buckles underneath him and he stumbles.

They march on through the night, over small crumbling bluffs and around high rock buttes bleached off all colour in the dark until they look like stone pillars to hold up that pale twist of stars overhead. The air is cold and their steps are short and although the weight on their backs rubs welts in their shoulder blades, they carry on until sun-up, with the light coming orange over the horizon, when they stop to sleep.

  


For the most part, the days are fairly dull. They're roused a few hours before first light, to try and cover as much ground as possible in the cool dark before the rises to pound its terrible heat over them again – swaddled, at first, in as much warm kit as they can wear without physically impeding their movements, and then having to struggle out it later, layer by sweaty layer, as the morning's gentle warmth builds into a heat so thick it seems near-solid – and they walk. Patrol, technically, but there's so little to see in terms of one enemy or another, or anything beyond dry grass and tumbleweed, that correct formation and technique has quickly broken down into a semi-alert afternoon stroll through the desert. The Androids stay alert, of course, with their weapons tucked into their shoulders in a proper, military-parade standard performance that never slacks.

"I'm just gonna go out on a limb here," Jo announces as they traverse an empty expanse of scrubland that stretches dusty and yellow as far as the eye can see, "and say that , for one, can't understand why anyone would even want to occupy Utah."

"They don't," Bela reminds her drily. "They want Colorado."

"But why?" Jo grumbles and kicks one foot through a prickly clump of yellow grass. "I mean, China has mountains, right? So what the hell do they want with these ones?"

"Hey, now, don't be hatin' on Colorado! There's more to her than mountains," Garth cuts in, jingling his rifle emphatically in its sling.

Dean eyes him sceptically. "You from Colorado, by any chance?"

"I had an uncle just outside of Boulder," Garth explains. "He's dead now – but he lived a good life. Colorado is one of the nicest places I ever been, though. All that natural majesty – plus it's got one of the Seven Wonders of the World in the Grand Canyon, so—"

Dean frowns at Garth's geography, but decides not to start an argument about it. Some things are worth ridiculing Garth over, but the location of the Grand Canyon isn't one of them.

Jo frowns. "I swear China has, like, two Wonders anyway."

"It's the Great Wall, I'm pretty sure," Cassie puts in. "Most of them are in, like, Greece and Turkey and places like that. Old places."

"China's old as balls," Jo says. "They invented fireworks and tea and shit."

"How about it, Kevin?" Gordon calls from a few feet behind Dean. "What Wonders are there in China?"

Kevin throws him an unimpressed look back over his shoulder. "Dude, I'm from Minneapolis."

Gordon holds his hands up, either in apology or surrender.

They walk on, trudging heavily under the weight of their packs, their supplies, and all their extra equipment. They'd trained for the extra weight, of course, and if they hadn't then they never would've made it five miles from the drop point, but even as it is, they're struggling a little as the day builds to the hottest point of the afternoon.

Dean looks over at 5284, walking beside him, but he has remained studiously silent for the majority of the day – just staring at the ground, seemingly focused with deadly intensity on putting one foot in front of the other, and with his hands curled tight around the shoulder-straps of his pack. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Dean tilts his head a little to the right as he tries to catch 5284's eye, but to no avail.

From the back of the queue, Sam clears his throat, and then his voice rises hesitantly to join the conversation. "Uh, Garth, you do know that the Grand Canyon's not in Colorado, right?"

"Sure it is! It's the Colorado River," Garth says cheerfully.

"Yeah… no," Sam says. "The Colorado River runs mostly through Utah, actually."

"And all the most famous and geologically interesting parts of the canyon are in Arizona anyway," Charlie chips in, and she even turns around as she walks to look across each member of the team individually, nodding as she does so, to ensure that everyone is absolutely in the clear about the Grand Canyon.

"Sorry, guys, we're gonna have to settle down now that the Canyon Queen is here," Dean calls out.

Charlie scowls at him, her mouth scrunched in an attempt not to let herself smile at him; Dean beams sunnily back. "It's true," she insists. "Isn't it, Goober?"

Charlie's Android, the stocky blonde, tilts his head towards them with a blank look, and he says, "It's true. Charlie's statement is factually sound."

"Whoa, how'd you get him to do that?" Cassie exclaims. "Did you re-programme him to agree with you, or—"

"No!" Charlie says, mouth falling open aghast at the very idea that she might have tampered with her Android for something so trivial. "It's just because I'm right—"

Dean holds up his hands. "Uh," he interrupts loudly, drawing the sound out long and slow to draw everyone's attention. "Am I the only one who thinks that the most important question here is why the hell does he respond to Goober?"

Sam bursts out laughing, and Charlie reddens a little. "That's his name," she says, and then adds, defensively, "Jo named hers, too!"

Jo reaches out a hand to clap on her Android's shoulder, and shoots her a grin. "Anna," she says over her shoulder, and twists slightly as she walks to call back. "I mean, the damn letters were already stamped on her chest – why the hell was I gonna read out A-N-N-A when it spelled an actual name?"

"That's what I tried, too," Charlie explains.

Dean frowns. "Right." He squints up through the harsh light, in the direction of Charlie's Android – he refuses to call him Goober, even in his head – and tries to read a serial number stamped on the back of his collar. "Wait, so what's yours again, Charlie?"

"G-B-R-L," she recites slowly. She shrugs. "I couldn't fit the L in, but… oh well."

There's a long pause, silent but for the crunch of their boots over brittle grass and loose chunks of rust-coloured rock as they walk, and ahead of them a low swirl of dust picks up, spinning idly in small tornadoes that slow and slow like a lazy hula-hoop orbit until they fall away back to the dirt.

After a moment, Sam suggests, "Gabriel?"

"Huh." Charlie slows her pace until she almost stops walking. "I… did not think of that."

Dean catches up with her, and he bumps her in the back with the butt of his rifle to get her moving again. "Better than Goober, anyway," he comments, and he just grins again when she smacks him on the arm.

"I thought of that as well, actually," Garth says thoughtfully.

Victor laughs. "Bullshit you did."

"No, I did!" Garth exclaims, his insistence so urgent and his accompanying nods so wild that he almost trips over. "Seriously, I've been calling mine Hester for a couple days, at least."

"And what, you guys like having names?" Dean asks.

The redhead – Anna, now – turns a little as she walks to address him. "The human mind ill-equipped to memorise long numerical sequences," she says, in a soft, muted voice. "I understand the preference for a simpler signal in order to compensate for your inability to remember the serial codes by which we were originally identified, and I'm perfectly willing to accommodate."

Jo turns back and pulls a face. Dean is unsure whether to be offended or reassured by the explanation, and just settles to say, "O-kay, then. Thanks."

They walk on under the incessant sweltering beat of the sunlight, on their skin and burning hot through the dark material of their combat suits, until in the distance the small irregular shape of a small red butte rises up in front of them. Victor points to it with one hand standing out stark against the pale, watery blue of the sky, and his out-stretched index finger seems to pulse and shift in the heat-waves as he tells the squad that in the shade of that butte is where they'll stop for some personal admin.

It's a relief to have something to aim for, at last, instead of trekking endlessly over an open space that never seems to hold anything new and the distance across which never seems to diminish. There is the sun and there is the jagged mouth of the horizon and here Dean's squad is, lost somewhere between the two, without any real sense of where they're going or what they're doing aside from walking as fast and steady as they can back towards some more concrete reality.

Dean glances across at 5284 as they continues, and, after a moment of watching him carefully – the deliberate placement of each foot, like he's trying not to crush any more of the dry flowers and scuttling desert bugs than he has to; the flex of his fingers on the straps of his pack every couple of steps, adjusting the weight where it sits on his shoulders – and then Dean prompts him, "So do you want a name, or what?"

5284 doesn't look up at him. He just keeps walking – left foot, right foot, never faltering or breaking pace, even for a moment – and he replies, off-hand, "I'm not averse to being re-named in order to improve ease of communication. If it gives you comfort, by all means."

Dean rolls his eyes. "Dude, it doesn't give me comfort," he tells him. "I'm used to 5284-whatever-whatever by now. It's just whatever you want."

For the first time that day, something breaks in 5284's comfortable vacancy, and a faint line pulls down between his eyebrows. His pace doesn't change, and he still doesn't look at Dean, but his eyes flicker up from to the ground in front of his feet, moving tentatively over the bodies moving before him in the formation, moving further beyond them towards the horizon. His mouth opens a little, and with a soft, dry sound, he roughly wets his bottom lip where it's chapped – almost pensively. "A name," he says at last, his voice low over the gritty crunch of the squad's boots and the harsh wind that whips Dean's collar back against his throat, "is one of the first semiotic symbols of personhood – and belonging."

Dean blinks. "What?"

"It's a kind of societal tether, if you like," 5284 goes on, and he tilts his chin up to squint at the sky again. The light is warm and bright as pennies on his skin, bleaching the blue of his eyes into a dim grey like cold water . "A stable identity for any given community to hold onto – something that lets them know that you are, fundamentally, no different from them."

Dean stares at him. "Alright, Nietzche, but it wasn't gonna be like a freaking ceremony or anything," he says slowly. "I was just gonna start calling you something different."

5284 frowns and purses his lips together. "That's not actually from N—"

Dean raises his eyebrows at him, and 5284 shuts up.

They move together, almost in step now as they walk, their rifles swinging lazily from side to side with every stride so that the metal casts its bright glint back and forth like a lighthouse beacon. Dean has the sunlight hot on the bridge of his nose and the apples of his cheeks - hot in a way that he can tell will leave him with a bold peppering of dark auburn freckles like he used to have when he was a kid. 5284 walks like he's got somewhere to be.

"So how about it?" Dean says, looking over again, and then he adds, just to tease him, "Would it, you know, give you comfort, or whatever?"

Finally, 5284 looks across at him, his expression as flat and solemn as ever, except that now his eyes crinkle up into crows' feet at the corners, like he's calculating something. He slows down walking – almost imperceptibly, had it not been for Dean walking left-foot-right-foot-left in perfect time with him, and so when 5284's foot falls a little after Dean's, Dean notices – and he only holds Dean's stare a second longer before he drops his eyes away to the ground again. "I think it would."

Even though 5284 is no longer looking at him, Dean continues to stare at him for a while after he's averted his gaze, because fancy that – having just given some whole mind-numbingly dull tirade about the importance of a name in belonging to a community, 5284 actually wants one. Dean isn't too good with monumental revelations, and so he doesn't let the significance of that whirl around in his brain too long; he just grins, nudges 5284 in the side with his elbow, and says, "How about Crapcannon 4000?"

5284 stares at him. "If you wish," he says, his words slow and a little uncertain, and then his eyes narrow suspiciously and track over Dean's face – taking in the look in his eyes, the lines around his mouth, lingering for a second on the wide curve of his smile – and then, after a beat, he says, "That was a joke."

"There we go!" Dean exclaims delightedly, and he cuffs 5284 on the shoulder, just hard enough that he stumbles as he walks, and he looks up at Dean with a squint that borders on irritation, only Dean's still grinning at him, and some of the annoyed scrunch fades from around his nose and mouth. Dean nods at him. "See, you're not half bad at this whole human thing. Now what are we thinking here—" he starts, and runs through male names that incorporate the letters C-S-T-L. "C…Christopher? Crystal?" he sniggers to himself, but clearly 5284 is oblivious to the norms of gendered names, and just blinks placidly at Dean as though it's all the same to him. "Come on, we've gotta have something – C-C-C." He bounces the sound sharply off his tongue, the syllable brittle in his mouth like the creak of cicada wings. "Cuhstuhl. Cah – Castle? Cas?"

"Cas," 5284 echoes warily. "It's… short. Functional. Easy to remember, I suppose."

"It doesn't have to be easy to remember, dude – you can call yourself freakin' Chrysanthemum if that's what floats your boat," Dean reminds him. "Do you actually like Cas, or—?"

5284 hesitates. "I like it," he says, and the sun is high over him in the slow afternoon, its light a dim yellow all across his skin and catching brassy on the ends of his hair.

The squad makes good time towards their stopping point, and within the next hour and a half, they reach the base of the butte that Victor pointed out to them all – which looms high and craggy above them now, in spite of having seemed unimpressive from afar, and which is lined with uneven stripes of crumbling white where chunks of the rock have eroded away.

As they reach it, Jo is the first to fling off her pack, and collapses on top of it with a theatrical groan, her legs sprawled out inelegantly to one side; the others waste no time in following suit.

It's only a temporary encampment, probably not to be inhabited any longer than a couple of hours, but they set up their sentry positions at each edge where the butte lifts straight up from the dirt, so that the sentries can peer out in every direction for incoming enemy – although Dean's pretty sure they'd spot enemy ten miles off, seeing as there doesn't seem to be much else out here to look at. They set out their folding hexamine stoves to heat up food and brew the closest approximation to coffee that they can get their hands on, and drain as much water as they're rationed, even with Cassie standing over the jerry-can with folded arms, saying, "Yeah, you boys better drink up – I've only been carrying the damn thing ten miles today for you" until the men diligently chorus, thank you, Cassie, and she bestows upon them her smug little glitter of a smile. Kevin unfolds his maps to get to work updating them in terms of empty territory still belonging to the Allied Forces and land taken by hostiles, and Sam sits with him to help him remember the ground they've crossed so far while he heats up something vaguely palatable for them both.

Having no need for food or water to keep them going, the Androids instead get to work maintaining their weapons in a battle-ready condition, while Garth suddenly gives a delighted squawk that he's found a scorpion the size of a dinner-plate, and Gordon and Charlie immediately go over to investigate. Dean, on the other hand, decides he can probably live the rest of his days quite happily without ever seeing a scorpion that big, and so he brews himself a cup of coffee, although as he holds the plastic cup in his hands he wishes there were a way to take in the same taste and energy refreshment without the same searing heat as the coffee is now burning into his palms. He crosses the encampment, stopping off briefly by where 5284 is sat in a small semi-circle with a couple of the other Androids – Hester, Gabriel, and the tall one built like a brick wall that Bela was assigned: one 2499-U-R-I-L – to say hello and remind them all not to have too much fun in case they injure themselves, and then he continues towards where Sam and Kevin have been joined by Cassie and Jo.

He drops down to sit cross-legged beside Cassie with a drawled, "What up, bitches," so he guesses he's asking for the slap she gives him in the stomach, and when his coffee slops from his cup all over his hand, she just laughs at him.

"How's it going with the ladies, Winchester?" Kevin asks innocently as he looks up from the maps he's spread out over the dark brown canvas tarpaulin from his map-pack.

"I have no feeling in my hand, but swimmingly," he replies, and gives him a bright smile.

"You don't want that shit anyway," Cassie tells him. "Coffee is just cancer warmed up—"

Sam holds up one index finger to silence her. "Cassie," he interrupts, his voice grave, "I don't want to have to hurt you, but I will if you don't stop talking trash about the things that I love."

Cassie laughs and starts in on him about how it's been scientifically proven that drinking large quantities of coffee can increase your likelihood of getting cancer, to which Sam retorts his usual 'I'm a doctor, Cassie, please remember that I'm a doctor', and Dean could quite contentedly sit back all day and watch this argument go nowhere productive. Jo leans over, however, and says to him, "So did you get a name for your Android, then?"

"Oh, yeah," Dean exclaims, and then he tilts back over his shoulder, looking in the direction of the small cluster where the Androids are working on their weapons, and he yells, "Hey – Crapcannon 4000!"

Sure enough, 5284 – or rather, Cas, which Dean will agrees is definitely less of a mouthful – lifts his head and looks over. As Jo bursts out in screeching guffaws, shouting at Sam and Kevin and Cassie, and anyone else who'll listen, you'll never guess what Dean's done, Dean holds Cas' eye, and then Dean winks at him. And it's the weirdest thing, so small and faint that you could be excused for thinking that maybe it was just a trick of the light, but for a second, with the dirt of the sandstone bluff a loose red cloud behind him like a halo, Cas smiles.

  


Somewhere just short of two A.M, some five days into the mission, Victor comes scrambling past the squad's tangle of sleeping bags where they lie, curled up or sprawled out, in the dirt waiting for sunrise, and he pounds the ground excitedly with his heel to get them all up. "Rise and shine, rise and shine," he urges, and reaches out to shake individual sleeping bags. "Time to move, come on!"

Sitting up groggily with his hair all askew, Sam is the first to voice what everyone else is thinking: "The fuck is going on?"

"You're getting up, that's what's going on," Victor tells him bluntly. He claps his hands together, loud and resonating right through everyone's ear-drums. "The scout patrol found something. Up – now! Come on, look alive."

With groans and muttered blasphemies, they manage to haul themselves out of their bedding and stuff it all away into their packs with practiced briskness so that they're ready to move in under five minutes, having stumbled into their warm night kit and readied their weapons for contact. They haul their packs up onto their shoulders, adjust their helmets over their foreheads so that the head-band won't rub as they run, and they move out without leaving a trace of themselves behind.

Victor gets them all double-timing after him back to the final rendezvous point where he's left the remainder of the original scout party, over sharp crests of rock and down the crumbling walls of gorges into crevices thick with bristly desert brush, where progress is slower for fear of someone twisting an ankle. In the past couple of days, they made it out of the open expanse of dry, red waste and are now into the uneven, craggy edges of the Colorado plateau, where the ground juts up irregularly into stacks and buttes and bumpy rock formations that curl around on themselves like old paper, patterned brightly with sunlight and erosion, where at any moment the dirt beneath their feet can unexpectedly drop away into a forty-foot drop of cracked dirt and sun-bleached stones as perfectly smooth as glass.

Jogging through that landscape in the dark when partly-asleep feels to Dean a little like putting a blind lab-rat onto a running wheel with half the rungs missing, but whatever Victor's patrol has found is the first lead on enemy movement they've had since they landed, so he's not going to complain. Not to Victor, at least – but Sam and Charlie, who jog just behind him in formation, are being regularly regaled with Dean's stage-whisper exclamations of just much he'd like to set fire to whoever decided that this kind of landscape was a good idea, because shit fuckity shitting fuck if he stubs his toe one more fucking time, he's just going to lie down and wait for death.

"Stop whining and face the front, Winchester," Bela growls from behind him, and she jabs him in the small of the back with her rifle.

Dean glances back over his shoulder as best he can with the bulk of his pack in the way, and he tries to flash Bela a seductive look. "Now, Sergeant Talbot, is that a weapon or are you just happy to see me?"

She scowls at him. "It's a weapon," she tells him flatly. "Eyes front!"

Dean grins at her – and then trips.

Before he can fall, however, there's a hand on his arm, a tight and steady grip just above the elbow, which holds him still and helps him find his balance. Dean straightens up, and looks back, but Cas' hand has already dropped away from him, back into its own space, and Cas just stares back at him now with that squinty set to his brow as though he's totally perplexed as to what Dean might want – as though no help were ever offered, or as though the assistance already given was so natural that it's nothing to praise or even mention. So Dean doesn't mention it.

A mile or so from their encampment, they find the rest of the squad tucked into a low tangle of bushes that froth over into the mouth of a deep crevice in the yellow dirt, and it's into this crevice the they duck down to remain out of sight as Victor redirects their gazes out towards the enemy.

"See there? And there. That's cigarette butts, glowing. Over there as well." Victor's finger tracks across the stretch of darkness before them, snagging across one dim glint of light after another. "They've been there a while – you can see the embers of a fire, too. Kevin, what's the intel?"

A faint, red glow starts up as Kevin switches on his tactical flashlight to check over the map and his recon notes. "There's only nine of them – Chinese – probably just a recon patrol like ours was, pushing boundaries. They look pretty relaxed, too… only one light artillery guy, from what I can tell, although there's always the potential to radio in something heavier from wherever they're based."

"There's that big-ass ridge behind them, though," Dean points out as he peers through the gloom.

"We've already checked the surrounding terrain," one of the Androids – Hester, Dean remembers Garth had taken to calling her – says, rather snippily too.

Dean sits back from her with his hands held up in front of him to show that he doesn't want any trouble, except he still leans back to mutter, "Touchy, touchy," to Jo.

They'll move out in fire teams, one and two, with Bela and her Android behind for artillery support; they'll outflank the enemy position and wait for Bela's mortar barrage before they move in. And then, in Jo's ever-eloquent terms, they'll 'annihilate those smarmy, mountain-stealing fuckers'. It sounds a simple enough plan.

Dean heads fire team one, with a six-person team at his back, if you include Androids, and together they crouch low to the ground and run through the scrub towards those dim, smouldering lights. At first they stick with the other fire team while they pick through the remaining dense foliage before the open ground, but when the scrub bushes dwindle into low, thorny shrubbery and then into no more that coarse stumps of dry grass that jet up from cracks in the dirt, they spread out. Due to the irregular number of actual infantry in the squad, fire team one outnumbers the second team by one person, and as a result of this, Sam disappears into the dark with the other team, and once again, with his stomach churning and an insistent pound of concern in his chest, Dean is hit by the realisation that he will never get used to having Sam out of his sight. He grits his teeth and turns his attention back to the task at hand.

They head around wide, staying far enough that the blurred shapes of the enemy soldiers never solidify into distinct silhouettes – far enough, then, that they can't be seen either – and when they're parallel to the enemy camp, they lie flat in the dirt behind whatever cover they can find and wait.

"Radio us in, Bradbury," Dean whispers, and beside him, Charlie shifts onto her other side so that she access her radio equipment.

It's a couple minutes until Bela gets back to them with the confirmation that she has both fire-teams in place, and then there's radio silence. Charlie snaps the transmitter back onto the strap of her webbing, and to Dean the sound seems like a gunshot in the quiet. He holds his breath.

There is a hollow thud that resonates all through the ground, and the bobbing lights of cigarette stumps clenched into ever-moving mouths grow abruptly still – Dean holds up one flattened hand above his head – and there's a shrill whistle that builds and builds, and then the night is lit up with dirt and fire and a screaming explosion that shakes all through Dean's bones – and his hand slices down through the air like a guillotine.

The furious rattle of gunfire starts up all around him, each shot bright in the darkness like a flare going off so that the rest of Dean's team are caught in fast-flickering freeze-frames each second that they're illuminated – there is Gordon with his face screwed up in concentration as he fires; there is Jo with her hair coming loose beneath her helmet; there is Cas – and Bela and her Android's mortars spit out shell after shell that buzz through the air like hornets to honey, and tear the ground apart. The Chinese soldiers don't give up, though; where at first there were screams of panic, their voices are now instead raised to give orders, calm and clear over the cacophony, and they've spread out into cover now so that rounds are coming down on Dean's fire-team with enough decisive aggression to have the team flinching back into the brush.

Dean smacks Charlie in the arm to get her attention, and shouts, "Call it – delta switch fire right, support ease up to the rear—" and lifts his voice to tell the others to prepare to move out. Five seconds tick by like a lifetime while Charlie radioes Garth in the second fire-team, but then the instant they've got the go ahead, Dean's yelling for the first two teams to move up – Jo and Anna on his left-hand side set off sprinting first, with Charlie, Gabriel, and Cas just a second later on the right. Then he and Gordon are up and moving too, short stumbling sprints that rip the breath clean from their lungs so that when they drop to the ground again, tucked into whatever cover is available, they have to wrestle with their own breathlessness as they click their safety catches off to fall back into the fold. Dean drags in a deep breath, holds it, and squeezes the trigger. Somewhere in all the smoke and chaos, the shot tears through a man's shoulder and flings him lopsidedly onto his back.

They move up pace by pace, one pair after another disappearing into the din until they're in the eye of the storm, weapons recoiling back into their shoulders hard enough to bruise. Dean's kneeling behind a low scrap of dead branches twisted together by the wind over time, and he looks back over his shoulder at the shapes of the rest of his team, jolting abstractly through the smoke like broken shadow puppets as the harsh light from the mortars and gunfire catches them.

"Move," he yells, once he's seen the other pairs down safely into their positions. With a slap to Gordon's shoulder to encourage him, he hauls himself onto his feet and runs – and then there's something like a punch to Dean's stomach, so hard and sudden that he comes to a dead halt in his tracks, his breath stopping short in his chest. He just stands there for a while, swaying slightly from side to side, his rifle pulled into his shoulder with a loose grip so that it aims outwards but not towards anything distinct, until he realises what he's doing, and he starts up jogging again.

The pain blossoms up slowly through him like the languid swirl of fresh coffee in cold milk – a pain that builds almost without being noticed, a slow tainting all through his body rather than tearing a bright, angry wound in any one place. His footsteps are slow, his toes dragging a little against the dry dirt so that he kicks up dust that catches the last dim glow of the firelight, and he feels this dull throb of pain inside him. It beats, just a little out of time with his steps.

Cas is in front of him, then, moving so fast that Dean can barely focus on what he's doing - his hand curled roughly into the fabric of Dean's combat suit, his mouth forming shapes: "Get down!" – and he jerks him roughly aside and throws him down so that he hits the dirt hard, but Cas doesn't seem to give a shit if it knocks all the wind out of him; he just crouches in front of him, rifle pulled up and he squeezes out three fast shots that flash like lightning, casting long shadows all along his hard line of his jaw and the straight slope of his nose.

"The fuck—?" Dean manages, and he tries to sit up, only Cas lets one hand off the hand-guard of his rifle to press against Dean's chest and hold him flat.

"You're hit, Dean, stay down," Cas tells him, and his voice is rough as old rock when raised over the echoing thunder of the fire-fight. He glances down at Dean, just for a second, but it's too dark to make out his face properly, and he looks away again quickly anyway. He tilts his body on one knee so that the shape of his body, plus the bulk of the pack they're tucked behind, block out Dean's form entirely.

In the mean-time, Dean props himself up on one elbow and spreads a hand over his stomach where the pain's dull ache seems to throb strongest, and his fingers come up wet. "Shit," he mutters – Cas wasn't kidding – and he tips his head back with a small groan because he just knows that Sam's gonna give him hell for this. He might as well make himself look useful. "Cas, let me up."

"No."

Dean's eyes narrow. "Please?" he tries, although his voice is hard to indicate that kowtowing to Cas' stubbornness is actually the last thing he wants to do right now. Cas doesn't even look at him. "Cas, what the fuck are you even doing – we're in the middle of a goddamn—"

"You're hit," Cas says again, more slowly, as though he thinks there's something wrong with Dean's hearing, and before Dean can even protest, he reaches out and grabs a handful of Dean's combat suit again to pull him a couple inches off the ground. "There's dead ground that way. You can wait for medical attention there. Can you walk?"

Dean splutters. "Yeah, Cas, of course I can freakin' walk, I'm not—"

Cas wastes no time; he jerks his rifle in his sling so that it slides around past his waist, out of the way, and the hand not currently clutching Dean's clothes slips around him, under his armpit, so that Dean's arm lifts and ends up slung loosely around Cas' neck. He helps Dean to his feet like this, and Dean expects that they'll maybe stagger a few steps like that before Cas will duck away to cover his movements – that's what any other normal soldier would do, but Cas is not a normal soldier, and has only a theoretical understanding of what's sensible and expected – and instead, Cas stays with him, helps him walk even when he doesn't have to. Dean doesn't want to imagine what would have happened if he'd said he couldn't walk.

He's glad of it, actually; his blood is a deafening thud inside his skull, and with the heavy pounding of pain all through his body, it's hard to even walk in a straight line without falling over, let alone with any haste. All the same, it's bizarre – Cas' arm secure around his waist, the warmth of Cas' skin even through the combat suit, the lack of urgency as they walk – and Dean guesses that Cas is probably more than a little bulletproof, but he's also more than a little electronics and steel, neither of which make for particularly good links to what Dean would only describe as sentimental behaviour.

The comforting lull of his safety with Cas doesn't last long, however, as they reach the dead ground and Cas unceremoniously dumps him back onto the ground. He rips a chunk of gauze out of a small first-aid kit tucked into the breast pocket of his combat suit, hands it to Dean, barks, "Apply pressure and stay down – I'll get Sam," and instantly rushes off again into the battle before Dean can make any kind of response. Dean figures Cas probably isn't the type to get a girl flowers in the morning.

Dean obediently presses the gauze to his injury, as hard as he can before the pain makes his head spin, and lies there listening to the yelling and thudding percussion of the battle. He isn't sure how much longer it goes on, as he blurs in and out of a dazed state of semi-consciousness, but at some point he snaps back into reality to the sound of his brother's voice, raw with panic: "What dead ground? Where is he?"

"Sam," Dean calls groggily, and he flails around the hand not administering the gauze to his wound. "Hey – over here. I'm in, like… a ditch."

They find him – Cas appears first, still clutching his rifle tight into his shoulder like he's expecting another contact, even though the air is quiet and still; Sam a second later, scrambling down towards Dean with his first-aid satchel already hauled up into his hands so that he can burrow through it for his supplies as he runs. The thick black smoke of the battle billows up behind them in a slow-twisting column that blocks out the crystalline swirl of pink and white stars overhead, and it cuts Cas out as a bold silhouette, his helmet lopsided, his rifle like an extension of his arm.

Sam skids inelegantly to a halt by Dean and starts clamouring over him; he tucks two fingers under his jaw to check his pulse, and his other hand just clutches at Dean's face, pressing against his cheek and his jaw like he's making absolutely sure that Dean is still really there, until Dean reaches up his free hand to feebly slap at Sam's face and says, "Sam, I'm okay – look, I'm still here. But, uh, maybe try checking out the bullet-hole?"

Sam just scowls at him and mutters something about how it's all part of the medical procedure and he'd thank Dean not to interfere with it, thank you very much, but he does get to looking at Dean's injury, after he administers a quick jab of morphine to Dean's thigh. Dean pats his brother's cheek one more time and then lets his hand fall limply back onto his chest, and he peers past Sam as he works for a glimpse of the rest of the squad.

"What's going on?" he asks while Sam peels back the blood-soaked fabric of his combat suit to get at the wound.

"The fire-fight's over – all wrapped up and done," Sam tells him. "We got one prisoner, so I think Charlie's radio-ing him into the satellites for Warrant Officer Mills to pick up - hold still a second – no, hold still." And then, continuing over the sound of Dean's grunts as Sam stitches up the entry hole, he goes on, "and then everyone is just sorting out casualties, ammunition, and body searches before we move out. We won't be staying here long. Roll over."

"Oh, Sammy, I love it when you talk to me like that," Dean jokes, except Sam punches him, so he does as he's told, although he bitches, "That's a little unprofessional," as he does. "What other casualties were there?" he asks as he lies obligingly on his stomach, while Sam cleans and stitches up the exit wound. Dean knows the other casualties can't be too bad, if Sam is prioritising him over them – although that's not always the best judge of severity, seeing as he remembers Sam prioritising Dean's sliced thumb over a kid with bust knuckles when he was in the seventh grade.

"Kevin got a chunk of shrapnel in his foot – ours or theirs, we can't tell – but his boot slowed it right down so his foot's not actually too badly hurt," Sam says distractedly. "And one of the Androids got hit right in the goddamn face. They're still walking and talking, though, so I dunno how that works. Gordon's dealing with it." Sam pulls the thread up high from Dean's wound and snaps it. He smacks the back of Dean's leg to indicate that he can get up now, and when Dean flips over with a grunt and a struggle, Sam holds his eyes for a second, his eyebrows raised in that don't-fuck-around-with-me expression from when they were kids and Dean tried to yank a couple of vital chunks of Lego away from him when he wasn't looking. "If you tear those stitches, I'll kill you."

"Noted." With some lucidity coming back to him as the morphine starts to kick in, Dean extends a hand with the expectation that Sam would help him up, but Sam just tidies his medical kit away and straightens up without even looking at the hand. "Sam. Sam. A little help here?"

"I don't want you moving until you have to," Sam say, dusting off his hands on the pants of his combat suit. "You're not too bad – the bullet just clipped your side, and I don't think there'll even be any muscle damage, but even so you're gonna be taking it easy for a while."

"Ugh. You suck. Fine."

Sam heads away back to the rest of the squad, presumably to check that everyone else is okay; at some point, Cas has left as well without drawing Dean's attention, and so now Dean is left alone in the bushes. It's not particularly glamorous, but it gives him time to just breathe and to allow his head to clear now that the fog of pain is gone.

It's another fifteen minutes or so before Sam comes back for him with the message that they're moving out again. It's not evident where to or how far they'll be going, but Dean understands that they can't stay here in case another enemy patrol gets to thinking, 'hey, I wonder what happened to that other recon patrol we sent out'. Eventually the rest of the squad can be seen forming up a couple yards from where Dean is sprawled, and Sam starts down the crumbling slope towards Dean, with Cas trailing a couple feet behind.

"Come on, grumpy," Sam says as he approaches. "Time to go." He takes Dean's hands and pulls him up to his feet, at which point Cas takes over in the same way he did before – ducking under the crook of Dean's elbow to pull him up, one arm around his waist to secure him – and then Cas looks to Sam for direction. Sam leads them back up to the rest of the squad, where Charlie fusses over him, and where both Jo and Kevin tell him in no uncertain terms that he's a total loser, and then they all head out together in loose patrol formation south-east.

They've been walking about twenty minutes in stalwart silence, except for Kevin occasionally griping about his foot as he hobbles – also with a buddy to hang onto: a role for which Garth diligently offered himself – and Cassie gloating over Victor that she was definitely the one who took out the Chinese artillery-woman at the back, when Cas draws in a short breath, as though to buoy himself up, and then awkwardly says, "How are you doing?"

Dean looks across at him with eyebrows raised. "Come again?"

Cas glances at him for a second and then looks away again, turning his eyes forwards to watch where he's leading them. "How are you doing," he repeats, although this time, he phrases it bluntly, like a statement, as though the personal interest required from a question is more than he can be bothered with. Then he adds, "You're injured," by way of explanation – like he thinks that maybe Dean has forgotten.

"Yeah, I know," Dean says. "I got shot. I won't lie to you, the details are a little fuzzy, but I definitely got shot."

Cas huffs in the back of his throat. "I was just enquiring after your well-being," he mutters, and if Dean didn't know better, he'd say that Cas sounds a little sulky at being rebuffed.

"Sorry," Dean amends, and he looks down at his feet as he walks. He's not limping – there's nothing wrong with his legs, after all – but he's slow, and treading a thin line between coherent and high as balls from the morphine, so he stumbles a little with every step. As it is, he's glad to have Cas with him. "I didn't mean to be like that. No, I'm – I'm okay. Alive, you know, so that's one thing."

"It is," Cas agrees. He shifts the arm slung around Dean, and there's something weird about the flex of his fingers on Dean's waist. "It still hurts, then?"

"Not really. The pain is kind of… blurry, now." Dean hesitates. "Then again, everything is kind of blurry now."

Cas does it again – that little huff of his breath, a sound that is slightly wheezy in his mouth, like a dull old squeak-toy being stamped on, and Dean realises it's a laugh, albeit an awkward one. Cas is laughing. Dean looks over at him in surprise, and he can't help his own mouth splitting into a faint smile.

"Thanks, by the way," Dean says, after they've walked on a little further, and he doesn't know what makes him do it, but he tightens the grip of the arm slung around Cas' neck in a pathetic attempt at a vague, one-armed hug. "For earlier, back when I was totally out of it. Even if you did toss me around like a bag of potatoes."

Cas frowns at him. "What?" He stares at Dean for a second, his eyes narrowed, and then realisation flits across his features. "Oh – when I rescued you?"

"Hey, no. You didn't rescue me," Dean protests feebly. "I'm not a goddamned damsel in distress – you just… kind of. You know. Helped me. Out of danger, and stuff. Shut up." He rolls his eyes.

"I did what I had to do," Cas says bluntly – whatever that means.

Dean shoots him a funny look. "You had to save my ass? I don't remember that being in the assault brief, actually, but I'll—"

"Look at your hands." Cas speaks softly, and his every step is a dull thumping all underneath his words, giving his voice a rhythmic, sleepy quality. "You were designed to build, not to fight."

"You have the same hands," Dean says, but there's something gentle in his own tone, like the words in his mouth are secret, only for Cas, and even by saying them out loud he's letting something precious escape.

Cas looks at Dean. "My primary function is to mimic your image," he reminds him. "Believe when I say that if we were engineered for optimum battle efficiency, we would not look like this. You're not built for this. It seemed wrong to me that you should die filling someone else's footsteps."

Dean doesn't know what to say to that. He feels like he has answers all stuffed down the back of his throat so tight that he can't pull a single response, witty or otherwise, without crumpling all of them into mothballs, and he walks on a couple more steps before he can even summon the mental strength to say, "Well, shucks, I didn't know you cared."

"I don't."

Well, whatever it was that Dean had been struggling to say, he's glad now it wasn't anything of any real emotional depth.

"Gee, thanks," he says, although he supposes that he is still trying to engage sympathetically with a cyborg, either way. "That means a lot to me."

They don't speak for several minutes. It's nearing dawn now, with a lightening in the sky's heavy darkness so that the black shifts through the indigoes and violets towards that dim shade of blue-grey before the sun has lifted its head to bring clarity to the morning. The squad, ahead and behind Dean, are cut out now like paper dolls against the sky, their faces faintly aglow with the first light.

Despite the silence, when Cas does respond, it's as though there was no lapse in the conversation; he states, out of the blue, "You care."

Dean looks over at him in surprise. "What?"

Cas tilts his chin up at Dean. "About everything, and everyone. About me, even. About Sam, in particular," he clarifies, "You care about him a great deal. And he cares about you."

Dean gives a short laugh, because the idea that anyone would have any question as to how he felt about Sam is a little ludicrous to him. "Yeah," he says at last, breathing the word out like a chuckle. "Of course I do – you know, he's family." Cas stares at him, and his brow creases and uncreases, over and over, like he's trying to work out a complicated mathematical equation. He doesn't say anything, so after a couple more seconds of Cas squinting at him there like he's buffering, Dean prompts him. "Family? It's a noun? That's in your database, right?"

"You're related by blood," Cas tries slowly.

"No – I mean. Yeah, okay, technically that's what it means but – it's more than that." Dean sighs as he tries to come up with a decent way to explain himself. "Family, it's not just something you're born with. Hell, I know some people whose biological families suck ass. Your real family is the one you choose. It's something you build for yourself, not something you find. Does that make sense?"

"So anyone can be family?" Cas asks. His frown has eased now, replaced instead by a look of open curiosity. "Not just blood relatives?"

"Yeah. You know – like," Dean gestures ambiguously with his free hand as he searches for the right words, "people you'd do anything for. Someone who's important to you, who you'd put in front of pretty much everyone else. You wanna keep them safe. That's family."

Cas inclines his head like he was going to nod and acknowledge that he understood, but he gets lost somewhere along the way and finishes staring straight up into the sky, and Dean thinks that's a weird gesture to programme into a cyborg, because he's sure as hell never seen any ordinary human being do that, so transfixed by all that wide, open space.

Idiotically, Dean ask, "What is it – what are you thinking?" – idiotically, because Androids don't think – except still, Cas tips his head over to meet Dean's eyes and answers.

"Just that acts of human selflessness are inherently detrimental to survival. And," he says, his voice taking on a tone that is quieter than usual, gentler, "that, in my opinion, the wonder of your species and how far you've come, is not that you have opposable thumbs, but that you have hearts."

Dean doesn't know what to say for a second. He just looks at Cas, with hair all mussed in the wind over the top of the plateau, and his mouth dry from the heat, and the creases that spider out from the corners of his eyes when he squints through the dim early light. Then Dean says, "And what about your species?"

"I don't have a species," Cas says instantly, and both his expression and his tone of voice slide back into that dull Android-copyright vacancy. "My external appearance is synthesised to mimic yours, but internally I have none of your organs or life systems. I cannot comment."

Dean rolls his eyes. "Yeah, but this isn't about life systems, is it? Jellyfish have life systems. Large carnivorous plants have life systems. You don't – so what?" He gives Cas a pointed look. "That's not what you meant and you know it."

Cas stares away from him, forwards at the backs of the troops who walk ahead of them in formation – Garth and Kevin blurred together like a single entity as they hobble; Jo hauling Kevin's extra pack on top of her own, moving slowly as a result of it; Charlie chatting quietly to her own Android with a quiet smile that catches the light when she tilts her head back to look across at him – and Cas almost seems to be no longer paying attention, except that he says, "I don't know what you're saying."

"Well, now you're just being difficult."

Cas makes a soft harsh sound in the back of his throat, like a sigh that got stuck, and he doesn't answer.

"You came after me," Dean says. "Like it or not, man, that wasn't part of the plan. That was all you."

The sun is coming up over the harsh red line of the mesa, and its light is soft and rust-coloured on Cas' face, picking out the crinkles at the edges of his eyes and the hard line of his mouth. He doesn't look at Dean.

  


Dean's incapacitated for some time after that incident, but fortunately, the next few days are mostly wrapped up in admin – Kevin has to alter his maps, and Charlie and Garth have to get to work on decryption and translation as they search for military intelligence in anything taken from the Chinese soldiers' bodies, and Gordon has to focus on trying to fix Hester after her face got smashed in, and Victor has to write up assault reports to send back to base via Warrant Officer Mills. Dean's job, for the most part, seems to be to lie around looking pretty, and it's a task that he is more than happy to fulfil.

They're settled into a small, deserted gas station just off a long stretch of cracked highway, and even though they've only been in the field just over a week, the luxury of having a roof and four walls from the dust and the heat feels like a five-star hotel, even if there's no running water and minimal furniture still-standing. As Casualty Number One, Dean is mostly consigned to the back store-room to get plenty of rest and peace of mind, only his injury's not that bad, and peace of mind is boring as anything.

There seems to be constant bickering from the rest of the squad, as the intelligence team work on what they found on the bodies of the enemy soldiers killed in the conflict; Jo and Cassie take the down-time to work on their physical fitness, although what exactly motivates them to start doing squats and push-ups in the heat of summer, Dean's not sure, but when they're not busy running down the highway until the speed-sign and back, they hang out with him, and Sam stays nearby most of time. Otherwise, his best companions are, bizarrely enough, the Androids – they don't have any specific field-tasks set to them aside from assisting the soldiers, and there's only so many time they can clean and test their weapons, so their time is largely unoccupied, and they settle around Dean like large, idle birds on a telephone wire.

While Sam tries to explain to Gabriel and Cassie's new little blonde one what enjoyment humans get from sports, Dean has settled down with Bela's and Kevin's Androids – which, out of sheer laziness, they've taken to calling Uriel and Inias, which are exact phonetic reproductions of U-R-I-L and I-N-I-S respectively, because they can't be bothered to think of anything more creative. Dean is attempting to teach them origami, not out of any real knowledge of the matter, but because the one thing this gas station supplies in great quantities is loose paper, and since he already knows how to make a tiny hat out of paper, he figures that cranes and ornate little flowers can't be that much more difficult.

"Wait, just one second," Dean says, and he leans over to peer at the crumpled paper in Inias' hands. "Okay, yours looks pretty good. What if we do it – yeah, like that – and then what if we fold this bit over? No, that's not right. Can we turn it inside out?"

Inias looks at him dubiously.

"Maybe not." Dean frowns between his own attempt at a paper swan and Uriel's, while, in the background, Sam's voice grows ever louder and more animated at Gabriel's suggestions that baseball might be some Freudian example of repressed homoeroticism. Dean hums loudly to himself as he considers the paper they have in front of them. "Okay, back to square one. This time, we're gonna fold it diagonally."

At that moment, the door to the store-room swings open with a loud clatter as it hits the back wall, and in the doorway stands Cas, blinking rapidly as he adjusts to the change in light from the bright outdoors. As he focuses, his eyes move across each of the room's inhabitants, now all staring up at his intrusion, and he says, "Forgive me – I hadn't realised that your sick-bed would be so heavily populated."

Dean pumps both fists into the air. "This is where the party's at, dude," he exclaims. "Come on in." He sweeps one flattened hand in a grand gesture to indicate the entirety of the space available, which is closer to a cupboard than an actual room. "Please – take a seat."

There are no seats. Even Dean is sprawled out across a make-shift bed made from old wooden crates, padded out with empty burlap sacks and a handle of cushions they'd pulled from the cabin of a broken-down truck out back. There is one swivelling office chair, but Sam's already called dibs on it, with his usual loud, bratty exclamations of 'excuse me, I'm a doctor'. The others either sit on the floor, perch on the edge of Dean's lumpy, impromptu chaise-long, or lean against the walls wherever there is space. Cas glances around the room, his eyebrows pulling together as he surveys the lack of any seating arrangement, and stays exactly where he is.

"Or not," Dean adds as he sees Cas' reluctance. "Where've you been, anyway?"

"Gordon was using me as a reference for his repairs on Hester," Cas says distractedly. His eyes are fixed on the enormous quantities of folded and scrunched-up paper that litter Dean's bedside and the grubby floor near it, and gradually the furrow in his brow deepens with bewilderment.

Dean grimaces. He hasn't seen much of Hester since they settled here and he was relocated into the back room, but what he remembers wasn't pretty – although she was still wandering around like there was nothing wrong, there was a gaping black hole just left of her nose, surrounded by bubbling purple where her synthesised skin had melted from the heat of the round going in, and the hardware underneath had gone off with red warning lights that flashed persistently red and angry underneath her skin like a Jack-O'-Lantern. "How's that going?" he asks.

"Slow. This morning she devolved into speaking Thai, which suggests that her internal programming may have been damaged somehow, in which case there's not much that can be done," Cas answers, still distracted as he eyes the discarded paper, and as he finishes speaking, his eyes flick up to meet Dean's with a frown. "What are you doing?"

Dean looks down at the paper in his hand for a second, studying it as though it might have some answers for him, but then he just looks back up at Cas and jerks his shoulders in a careless shrug. "Origami."

Cas stares at the mangled squares of paper all around him with an expression that treads somewhere between horror and incredulity. "No, you're not."

Dean tosses the crumpled sheet he's holding into the air with a short sigh of resignation – although the gesture isn't quite as theatrical as he would've liked, because the paper has no weight to it, and it just drifts slowly back to sit on the edge of his bed – and he turns to Uriel and Inias to say bluntly, "Sorry, kids, but we can't play anymore. The Origami Police are here and fun is against the rules, apparently."

Cas squints at him.

From mid-spin in the office chair, Sam calls, "Ignore him – he's just being an asshole," and even though Dean throws up one hand to flip him off, Cas gives Sam a quick look of gratitude, and some of the awkwardness seeps out of his stance, although he still makes no move to actually come into the room. Sam stretches out to prop his feet against the wall, holding himself still as he faces Cas, and he says, then, "Hey – what've you got there, anyway?"

Sam's more observant than Dean is; it's only when Dean's attention is drawn to it that he notices the small metal packet clutched in Cas' right hand. Having been called out, Cas starts to shift uncertainly from one foot to the other, but then he holds out the packet to look at it, as though he's only just realised that he was holding it.

"I found these," Cas says, and his eyes flick up to Dean's face and away again, moving rapidly like he doesn't know where to look. He settles eventually on Sam, and stares right at him. "Victor sent me to make an inventory of everything in the gas station's store, in case there was anything that might be of use to us – the results were inconclusive, aside from some old first-aid kit which perhaps you could use, Sam, but – these, I found behind the cash register." Cas shakes the packet and gives a curt little nod. "Chocolate-covered peanuts. I thought Dean might like them. Human custom is to give commiseration gifts to invalids, so." His gaze darts towards Dean again, just for a second, and then he extends his arm to shove the packet forwards. "Dean."

For a second, Dean just looks at him, speechless.

Cas holds his eyes only briefly and then looks away at his feet again, and he pushes the packet towards Dean again, so Dean wriggles on his crates to sit up properly and takes the packet; Dean's fingers bump against Cas' before Cas lets go. "Thanks, man," he says, and makes sure to wait until the next fleeting moment that Cas glances at him, and then he smiles. "That's really cool. Thanks."

Sam sits in the corner, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. "Uh, Dean," he starts.

Dean shoots him a warning look over his shoulder. "Not now, Sammy."

Cas catches on anyway, and he looks between them with a crease pulling down between his eyebrows again. He stands quietly and his eyes flicker from Dean to Sam and back again, observing their silence. "What is it?"

Sam clears his throat. "Cas, look, it's a really nice—"

"Nothing," Dean cuts across him. "Don't worry about it. It's just nice, that's all. Sam, shut up."

Sam sits back in his seat and spins back to face Gabriel, holding his hands up in surrender as he goes, to show that he's not taking any more part in this debate. By then, it's too late, though; Cas is staring at Dean now. "Something's wrong," he says.

"No, man, I just—" Dean hesitates, and he lets out a long sigh. "It's just – I'm just kind of very allergic to peanuts, is all. You didn't know, so it's fine – but I, uh, I can't eat them. But thank you, anyway."

"Oh." Cas presses his lips tightly together. "My apologies."

Sam swivels back partway in his chair, peering over his shoulder. "Does this mean I can have them?" he asks.

"Dude," Dean says exasperatedly, and he throws his hands up. "You couldn't have waited, like, another thirty seconds? At least?"

"Well, you're not gonna eat them," Sam mutters sulkily.

"Protein is good for re-building strength," Uriel comments, and he gives Dean a look that seems to suggest that Dean has somehow done something wrong for being allergic to peanuts. "It's a shame your body lacks the facilities to digest it. With incinerators, there is no such dilemma."

Day by day, Dean has the increasing sense that Uriel is the President of the Android Supremacy Club. "My bad," he says. "I'll try harder next time."

"You can give the peanuts to Sam, if you like," Cas announces, and he nods graciously at Sam like he's granted him some incredible privilege. "They're yours now – you can do with them what you want."

Dean looks at him with amusement. "Yeah, I know. I know how gifts work."

Cas bristles. "Well, you may have thought that there was some sentimentality in the exchange which might hinder your sense of being able to pass them on—"

"Was there?" Dean asks.

Cas blinks at him and doesn't answer.

Dean raises his eyebrows.

"No," Cas says, eventually, but the hesitation was too clear. Dean grins at him, and Cas' mouth twitches a little at the corners, like it aches to echo Dean's smile, but he doesn't; he remains blankly dour. "Give them to Sam."

Sam lets out a small cheer and stretches out his hands, clasping and unclasping his fists in grabby motions, until Dean tosses the pack of peanuts backwards to him. Just as Sam tears the foil open and gets to peering inside at whether the contents are still edible, having been left lying around in this gas station for however many months or years, there's a loud banging from inside the gas station store – someone hammering on the exterior door – and Bela's dulcet tones drift through. "Everyone out," she yells. Sam's face falls, and he reluctantly folds his newly-acquired packet of chocolate peanuts away into his combat suit as Bela goes on, "Briefing by gas pump three, effective right now. You too, Winchester!"

Dean splutters with the injustice of it, and shouts back, "I'm injured!"

"You're going to need a lot more than stitches to get my foot out of your arse in a second, Dean," Bela retorts, and through the store-room door, Dean can see her swinging off the store's metal grille with a look like thunder. "Stop being so melodramatic – you were barely grazed. Get out here, all of you!"

With a theatrical groan, Dean hauls himself off his crates, with the assistance of Sam and Inias, and he slowly moves with stiff steps out through the store. Before he can get out past the rows of dusty shelves and mouldering old toiletry packets still stacked in misshapen piles, Sam grabs his elbow and pulls him back.

"Hey, hey, what's with the grabbing?" Dean complains as he tries to jerk away from Sam's grip. "I'm an invalid here, have some sympathy."

"Just… shut up a second," Sam tells him disapprovingly, and he keeps hold of Dean's arm until all the Androids are out through the front door. Cas is the last to go, and he turns slightly in the doorway to look back towards them, but then goes all the same. When Dean moves to follow him, Sam grips his arm tighter and says in a grave undertone, "You need to be careful about Cas."

"What?" Dean yanks his arm away. "What do you mean? Cas is cool, he's—"

"He's different," Sam says. His eyes dart away to where the rest of the squad is gathering by the gas pumps; Dean follows his gaze and watches Cas walk, quick and slope-shouldered, after the neat group of the other Androids. The others don't walk like that - they move slowly, with careless, straight-spined grace, like they have the algebraic formula for greatness written into their veins, and don't need to think about themselves. They have the same click to their heels, the same snap to their step; Cas drags his feet a little, like a child taking long strides. When he comes to a stop, he tilts his chin up, but not to the precise military-standard with which the others hold their heads up, so that their jaws are almost a sharp ninety-degrees to their throats. Cas looks up like he's searching for something. He looks towards the gas station store, and Dean meets his eyes through the glass. "He's not the same as the rest of them."

Dean swallows. He drags his eyes away from Cas and looks back at Sam. "So?"

"So," Sam says slowly, like he's chewing the words out with careful precision, "different isn't gonna win him any points, Dean."

Dean doesn't know what to say to that, so he falls back onto his usual defences: inappropriate jokes and absolute denial. He points an accusatory finger in Sam's face, wiggles it back and forth, and says with a teasing grin, "Neither is cruel, malicious gossip, Samantha. Shame on you."

"Dean."

"He'll be fine. And I'll be fine!" Grinning, Dean takes a couple languid steps backwards away from Sam, and he nods rhythmically with every step, to underline just how totally, absolutely fine he is with everything. "I'm a big boy, Sammy. I can handle it. Okay?"

Sam's face has fallen into that unhappy look of disapproval, like a puppy left out in the rain, his mouth turned downwards, and for a moment it looks like he's just going to watch Dean go with no more comment except for that tragic face. Then, just as Dean reaches the door and turns to go through it, he calls, "He's not a person, Dean."

Dean stops, one hand frozen on the door-jamb. Outside, the rest of the squad catch sight of him taking his sweet time to get to the gas pump for the briefing, and Kevin gestures wildly for Dean to hurry the fuck up and get down there; just behind him is Cas, standing with his feet planted solidly apart on the tarmac, his hair all caught in the wind so that it sticks up at ridiculous angles, and he's squinting a little through the bright light with his mouth screwed up. He looks totally stupid, the word 'LOSER' practically stamped on his forehead in red official lettering, but he looks human, and at the same time as Dean felt this warm rush in his stomach at the sight of him, Dean realises that he'd forgotten he wasn't.

"Remember?" Sam prompts him quietly, and Dean just stares out at Cas a moment longer, fighting desperately to find something in him – some gesture or some expression, some way of holding himself - to remind Dean that he's all metal and pre-programmed mannerisms. Dean's coming up with nothing, and then Cas lifts one hand to shield his eyes against the sunlight as he peers back at him, probably wondering what the hell is taking him so long, and Dean knows Sam's wrong.

He doesn't bother answering. He just pushes through the door and he heads out into the harsh glare of the afternoon.


	3. Chapter 3

In the next few days, they move out from the gas station and continue patrolling, and much to Dean's disappointment, he is deemed fit to carry his own equipment, so he can no longer peremptorily treat his friends like slaves; in fact, those who had been forced to carry his shit for the days before they reached the station now call in all kinds of favours and debts owed by Dean.

Every time they stop for a break, Dean winds up rubbing Jo's shoulders – she tells him theatrical tones about how stiff and aching and painful they are since she's been carrying some other asshole's pack – and Charlie comes across regularly to steal Dean's coffee because her energy stores are currently very low since she's used up all her strength helping an invalid. Sam, of course, thinks it's hilarious, and takes great pleasure in sitting back and watching Dean get shit on by everyone else. He doesn't even want to call in any of his own favours; he says that the disgruntled expression on Dean's face as he cleans Gordon's rifle is more than satisfactory.

They go east. They come across the traces of old enemy encampments, one camp after another scattered about five miles apart – the dusty charcoal scratches of field stoves set up; the tell-tale scrapes in the dirt of sleep-twitching bodies in heavy fabric sleeping bags; footprints and cigarette butts – but the actual soldiers are long gone, disappeared into the dust and the sunlight without any indication of where they were headed or what they were doing. It frustrates Victor to the point of splitting the squad up into small fire-teams to send each in different directions, until sun-down, in search of any sign of foreign activity.

Heading north-east, Dean is sent off with Cassie, Sam, and Cas, plus the skinny blonde Android that Cassie is too lazy to name, following a dim scuff of tire-tracks that appear periodically where the dust is thick and then fade away again. As they get away from Victor, who has been growing increasingly stressed by the lack of enemy contact, and Bela, who has been growing increasingly stressed by Victor shouting all the time, their small team settles into a comfortable warmth, falling back into banter and easy, idle conversation which for some days has been strained.

Dean and Sam don't talk about Cas – at least, not in the sense of Sam crowding Dean with ugly truths which he refuses to listen to – but Dean finds a weird sense of satisfaction every time Cas engages Sam in conversation. He never says a word to Sam about his convictions that Cas is more than just machinery, but seeing the perpetual crinkle between Sam's eyebrows as he talks to Cas about the most mundane and meaningless things is more than enough, because there is no logic in Cas being interested in any of it – and yet here they are.

Strictly speaking, Dean doesn't actually know what they're talking about. He's gone scout for this patrol, with Cassie next in line, Sam falling in the middle, and Cas taking up the rear, but he has the gentle murmur of their voices as background noise to his every movement, every word he exchanges with Cassie, and it's comforting. On top of that, when they stop to take on water and split up their ration packs for lunch, Sam and Cas sit side by side – still talking – and there is a softness to his face as he talks, like the expression of a man the first time he holds someone else's baby, where he's not completely comfortable with the situation, but he cares enough to know that this is important. In fact, it even reaches a stage where Dean feels uncomfortable at the thought of intruding, but then again, rank is not without its privileges, and he's exceptionally good at moving around everything that everyone else is doing to best accommodate the things he wants. Usually he just likes to throw his weight around on movie night to get the old classics that he likes, but being the fire-team's commanding NCO has other benefits.

"Alright, let's switch it up, now," he says as they haul themselves back to their feet after their break, and while they wriggle back into their webbing and shoulder their packs, he points in the direction they're headed. "Cas, you take point—"

"But I just went point," Cassie says, bewildered.

"No, not you – I meant – Cas?" Dean raises his voice to get Cas' attention, and waves him over to head the patrol. "Now you're Cas-sie, okay?" he says to Cassie, who is still frowning, and he shepherds her towards falling into place behind Sam at the rear.

"Well, that's just confusing," she says, although she does fall in as she's instructed – Cassie behind her Android behind Sam behind Dean behind Cas, so that Dean is neatly tucked into the middle of any and all profound conversations between his brother and his Android, although any discussion they may have been having has come to a standstill now. Cassie rolls her eyes and continues, "Why do you have to call him Cas, anyway?"

Dean throws her a quizzical look over his shoulder as they head off. "I dunno, it was the first thing I thought of that suited him. What's wrong with it?"

She shrugs, her head rolling left to look away into the far distance, and she pulls a face. "Nothing – it just rings a little close to Cassie, is all."

Dean frowns. He adjusts his rifle in its sling so that it sits more comfortably in his arms. "Didn't think of that."

"Subliminal message, I'm thinking." Cassie quirks her eyebrows at him. "Maybe you're hot for me."

He grins at her before he turns back to face the front. "You wish."

Cassie laughs, and it reminds Dean a little of how they used to be, back before he got that big ridiculous crush on her, and he can tell Sam's mind is along the same lines with the way he's shaking his head, his mouth in that wearily amused smile.

Cas opens his mouth, then, and there's a beat where he just holds that position, looking hesitantly perplexed, before he says, "Cassie, you—"

She waits for him to respond, but he doesn't. "Huh?"

Cas closes his mouth. He looks back, and his eyes move to Dean, uncertainly. "Forgive me," he says, his tone humble in all its roughness. "It's not my business."

Dean looks at Cassie to see if she has any better idea of what's going on, and finds her looking between Dean and Cas with her lips curved in an expression somewhere between bewilderment and incredulity. "You know he was kidding, right?" she tells Cas flatly. "We're not—"

"No, I understand – Dean was being facetious," Cas says, but he looks quickly at Dean again, and then away.

Cassie lets out a short, dry laugh, and she points an index finger at Cas, saying, "He's a nosey one, isn't he?", and where she had temporarily slowed her gait, she speeds up again, her strides long with her rifle swinging slow like a pendulum at her side. Her Android walks stiffly at her side, staring straight ahead with disinterested blue eyes, completely disengaged from the conversation, and Dean realises she's right.

"Yeah, rude," Dean chimes in after Cassie, and he wags an obnoxious index finger warningly at Cas. "Get with the programme."

"I only have one programme," Cas replies snippily, bristling, "and I already apologised for my error of judgement in assuming that I was in any way owed the information."

"Maybe you just shouldn't have said anything, then," Dean bitches, determined as ever to have the last word; he can even hear Sam tutting disapprovingly behind him. Cas doesn't answer, much less turn around or look at Dean, and they walk on for several miles in total silence.

Overall, they find the grimy remains of a ration pack, carelessly thrown into a creosote bush, some fifteen miles north of where they left Victor, and otherwise nothing. They were meant to head back at sun-down, but the constant mirage of finding something just a couple miles further keeps them going until gone twenty-one-hundred hours, and it's coming up to ten before Cassie sighs and radios it back to the others, and with reluctant defeat they turn around.

There's nothing here, no sign beyond a grubby food wrapper that anything ever was, and the temperature is dropping now to that harsh, ugly chill that usually has them retreating into their sleeping bags until the sun comes back up. Dean flips his collar up; Sam puts on gloves; Cassie lets her hair out from underneath her helmet to keep her ears warm. Cas watches them make the adjustments with faint curiosity.

As long as they walk all through the night, it should only take them until oh-five-hundred to get back to the rest of the squad, and so they walk – Cas leading the way, Dean behind him, with Sam at his back, and 3737-S-M-D-L and Cassie bringing up the rear. They don't talk much, so Dean's schemes to get himself in the centre of Sam and Cas' conversation is all for nothing; it's late and they're tired, and they trudge endlessly through the night and the scrub towards the rendezvous point.

Ahead of Dean, Cas' strides are irregular. His is not a left-foot-right-foot-left walk, blind of anything but purpose and perfect mechanical execution; he slows down when he spots something interesting nearby, and he carefully manoeuvres around plants instead of stamping straight over them, and he tips his head back occasionally to peer past the brim of his helmet at the sky. He scuffs his toes through the dirt. He drums his fingers in a thoughtless staccato on the straps of his pack, and Dean wonders how he can do it: whether that's programmed into him – drum rhythmically in idle moments, make a kind of senseless music – or whether he's just making noise for the sake of it.

Dean is so caught up watching Cas that he doesn't hear at first when Cas says his name. Then Cas turns around and repeats more urgently, "Dean!", and points into the distance ahead and to the right of them. Dean follows his finger and spots two dim spots of light in the distance, bobbing like buoys in a dark sea, and he freezes.

"Everyone down," he orders, and they drop to a crouch in total silence. There's no cover anywhere here, but it's dark enough that it might not be a problem. He gestures with the flat of his hand for the rest of the team to spread out, scatter the large shape that their ensemble makes in the darkness.

"What is it?" Sam whispers.

The two lights grow larger as they approach, and by their perfect, level spacing , Dean realises – "I think… it's a car?"

Cassie laughs under her breath, but the sound dies in her throat as with the lights comes the dim, unmistakeable rumbling of an engine. Dean shifts his weight from sitting on one heel to the other. Cas cocks his rifle, the sound in the hush as sharp as the snapping of bone.

"Can you see anyone else with them?" Cassie asks. She tucks her hair back up into her helmet, and locks the clip underneath her chin.

Made self-conscious of his own helmet by Cassie's shifting, Dean flattens one hand over the crown of it and pushes it back clear of his eyes. "Nothing I can see, yet." He glances sideways, past Cas, towards where Sam is no more than a long-limbed silhouette tucked somewhere in the black. "Sam, drop back."

As he looks back to the front, he looks past Cas again, and accidentally makes eye contact along the way. There's about five yards between them, but somehow the dark seems to compress it to less than a handspan. The light from the car – still dim with distance – picks out the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the curve of his lower lip. Dean swallows.

"It doesn't appear armoured," Cas says.

Dean blinks at him. "What?"

Cas frowns. "The vehicle," he clarifies, and he glances away towards it. "It doesn't seem to be—"

"Oh – right. Gotcha." Dean turns out to front again and watches those two twin bright lights jerk over the uneven terrain towards them. He squints through the dark and adds, "No convoy either. Maybe they're lost."

As the lights get closer, Dean can pick out the shape of a small pick-up truck, and from inside the cab come raised voices.

"Cas, move out left flank," Dean whispers. "Cassie, you take the right. Close in on them." He shifts of his heels, impatient as they go swiftly into the dark, and already he's feeling the steady thrum of adrenaline under his skin, his pulse so loud in his ears that his whole body seems to beat with it.

He snaps the safety catch off his rifle. He holds his breath.

When the truck is close enough that the harsh white beam of its headlights almost fall on Dean, he gets to his feet, yanks his rifle up into his shoulder, and yells, "Stop the car!" He doesn't know if they speak any English, but he figures a guy with a rifle popping up out of the dirt is a pretty good incentive to stop, and the two bodies that come out of the dark either side of the cab, with their weapons cocked, would also help.

"Hands above your head," Cassie orders. "Get out of the car slowly – slowly, now."

Technically, Dean couldn't even see through the headlights, but he has his visor down so that they can't see him squinting, and he just fervently hopes that no-one in the truck pulls a gun on him. Once the doors of the truck pop open, however, Dean figures his work is done, and he moves around to the passenger door, by Cassie, who speaks in low, soothing tones as she helps the man on her side to get out.

The man is elderly, and wears a blue woollen hat, and he talks to Cassie in anxious Mandarin as he steps away from the truck. On the other side of the cab, Dean can hear Cas speaking the language fluently, and he directs Cassie's prisoner around to Cas' side while Dean checks inside. One pistol, still holstered; an open packet of cookies between the seats; a map, creased and uncreased along all the wrong seams until it's little more than a crumpled mess; there's static on the radio and a small photograph of a fat toddler pinned to the corner of the dashboard. The windows are rolled down.

"What's in the back?" Dean calls out through the window, and he checks whether the pistol is loaded before he takes it. He hears Cas relay the question to the two enemy as Sam searches them, and the answer comes back a moment later: ammunition. Covered by a thick tarpaulin are a couple hundred metal boxes holding rounds of all calibres, and Dean gives a low whistle at the sight of it. "Jackpot."

Sam comes around the back corner of the truck, one hand drumming idly against the side of it as he walks. "Cassie's searched them, stripped them of anything we could use, and got them ready to transport. Have you radio-ed it in yet?" he asks.

Dean shakes his head. "Not yet – look at this shit." He gestures underneath the tarpaulin. "Warrant Officer Mills gonna have a field day."

Sam raises his eyebrows. "Jesus." He lets out a long breath. "What're we gonna do with the car, anyway? There's no way Mills'll be able to collect that as well."

Dean grimaces. "Siphon the fuel, I guess? Let out the tyres. If anyone from the Alliance is coming to this area anytime soon and needs a ride, we can let them know, but otherwise…" he trails off and gives a non-committal shrug.

"Fair enough."

"So what's the deal with the truckies?" Dean asks, jerking his head towards where Cas and Cassie are stealing dealing with the prisoners.

"The man's a Lance Corporal – the driver's his daughter. They were carrying ammo and food supplies from Delta to a little camp just outside of Grand Junction – got a little lost coming through the plateau."

Dean looks at him sceptically. "They told you all that?"

Sam pulls a face, his mouth turning down in a resigned acceptance, like he agrees that the truth is weird but he's not going to question it. "I think they just don't wanna be hurt," he admits. "Even if it means selling out their own people."

"Huh." Dean chews his lower lip. He looks over at Sam, and one hand still fidgets on the loose-thread edge of the tarpaulin where it hangs part-way over the ammunition boxes. "No-one's gonna… you know. Hurt them. Are they?"

Sam looks at him. "No," he says. He hesitates. "No."

"But back at base—" Dean pushes.

"No," Sam says, more firmly this time, and he slaps the side of the truck absently before he heads back around to the front of the cab, but the conversation is left hanging heavy in the air like miasma.

They call it in; Warrant Officer Mills is in orbit, somewhere over Russia, and tells them she'll be there ASAP – sometime in the next twenty-four hours. "You guys just hang tight," she says. "Let me get out of goddamned Siberian airspace."

"Yes, ma'am." Dean has to let Victor know of the discovery, as well as the consequent delays, and then they settle in for the night. They tie the hands of the Corporal and his daughter in front of them so that they can still eat a share of the team's rations, and Den offers to share a sleeping bag with Sam so that one is left free for the prisoners, since they're not allowed to take shelter in the cab of their truck. They set up a small fire so that they can be seen by Mills whenever she flies over, and sentry duty is expanded to include maintenance of the fire – keeping it smouldering brightly even that it can be seen overheard, but not so high as to be seen from a distance on the ground. And then they wait.

Warrant Officer Mills comes a little after sunrise, when the sky is still stretched a thin and membranous shade of blue that has not yet committed itself to the day ahead. The ship is sleek as a knife's edge cutting through the air, and it kicks up two small tornadoes of red dirt from each engine as it touches down. Mills, when the team meet her for the first time as she descends the narrow metal steps lowered from the cargo bay, is a small white woman with brown hair pulled back and a sunny smile, who greets the prisoners with an authority that is equal parts irrefutable and kind-hearted. Once the team have hauled all the truck's ammunition boxes on board, and passed over the confiscated weapons, Warrant Officer Mills gently shepherds the two prisoners on board, and, with no more than a jaunty wave and an exclamation to "Keep in touch, kids", she's gunning up the engines for lift-off.

Dean, Sam, Cas, and Cassie stand well back from the roar of the engines as they watch her go; Sam flattens a hand over his brow to keep his hair out of his face as it's whipped into sharp frenzy by the gusts being sucked into the engines. Cas shields his eyes with one hand; Dean sticks his hands deep in his pockets and just screws his eyes up against the dust. Cassie huffs under her breath and mutters a "good riddance" that is more frustrated at the delay than it is spiteful, and she walks off towards the truck. Dean twists to look back over his shoulder at her for a second as she checks under the tarpaulin, and then he turns back to the heavy pulse of the engines as they hungrily gulp air faster and faster for take-off. The ship momentarily judders on its supports as it adjusts, and then it lifts.

"What will happen to them?" Cas asks, out of the blue, as the dirt swirls up thick and rust-coloured beneath the ship and rolls towards them like waves.

Sam looks over at him in surprise, and he lowers his hand from his face; his hair buffets into the side of his face hard enough to make him wink one eye free of its stinging lashes. "Uh," he says. "Well, they're prisoners of war, so. They'll go to prison."

"Prison," Cas echoes, his voice sounding a little hollow.

Sam glances at Dean, as though unsure how to proceed. "Yeah, it's like – secure holdings for criminals. It's meant to be punishment, as well, but sometimes it's just to keep them—"

"I know what prison is."

Sam clamps his mouth shut and gives Dean a helpless look as though to say, I'm trying my best and look at what I get in return. "Okay," Sam says. "Then… that's what's gonna happen to them. Prison." He pauses, mouth slightly open as he searches for anything else to add to that, but seems to come up blank. He shrugs in Dean's direction and adds feebly, "That's it."

"And what if we had let them go?" Cas asks. Under the canopy of his hand, he squints at ship as it hovers a couple yards above the ground, waiting for enough power in the engines for it to head off, and then he looks over at Dean.

Something about his eyes on the side of Dean's face is hot like sunlight through a magnifying glass, and Dean doesn't meet him halfwa3ay. He stares determinedly at Mills' ship as it charges and lifts, rising like a helium balloon up and up until he has to tilt his head right back to see it – and yet Cas doesn't ease off. Dean says, "I don't know."

Cas says, "Dean."

"What? I don't know, alright?" Dean shoots him a scowl. "Ask Sam, why don't you?"

Cas looks at Sam, who clears his throat and immediately begins to look everywhere else except at Cas, muttering some excuse about having to be anywhere else before he wanders off towards the truck. Cas looks back at Dean. "Sam's gone."

Dean sighs. "Of course he is."

"What would've happened to them?" Cas persists. "If we'd let them return to their own people? Would it have been better for them?"

Dean takes off his helmet and rubs a hand backwards through his hair, resigned to the fact that he can't escape the conversation. "Well. Yeah, I guess," he says. "They wouldn't have been prisoners, which I guess is pretty important. You know… they'd just get back to work, probably. Delivering food, ammo, whatever…" He shrugs. "Do the job they were meant to do."

Cas considers this, and his eyes narrow. "Being told what to do, how to do it. How to live." He looks at Dean curiously. "Is that not its own prison?"

Dean startles. "What? No. I mean – come on, that'd mean that we're in prison, too."

Cas stares at him. "Aren't you?"

Something like a chill creeps unsettled all through Dean's bones, and he holds Cas' eyes like a challenge. "No. I'm a free soldier."

"That seems a contradictory statement." Cas holds out his hands in front of him, fingers stretched wide, as though observing some experiment taking place beneath his own skin. "You follow orders, routines, schedules. You eat when you're instructed to eat. You sleep when you're instructed to sleep, and—"

"And you don't do either," Dean points out. "Does that make you free?"

Cas ignores him, and as he speaks, he flexes his fingers individually. Dean can see the shift of the mechanics of his hand, metallic metacarpals stretching upwards into neat ridges. "It seems to me," he goes on, "that most of your human life is governed by other people's orders, and what segments of it are not are spent waiting for them."

"So what if it is?" Dean asks irritably, and he sticks his hands back into his pockets as an act of defiance; something about the way Cas is looking at his fingers makes Dean's own hands itch like they're under some invisible laser scrutiny.

Cas' hands drop back to his sides, and he turns to fix Dean with a look that is hard and unflinching. "Is that satisfactory? Are you content with that?"

"Yeah," Dean retorts, perhaps more aggressively than is entirely necessary. "I get paid," he adds, and Cas just inclines his head in an sage half-nod, like he's just had some hypothesis finally proven, and it's so obnoxious and patronising that Dean snaps at him, "What does it matter, anyway? What's got into you?"

Cas hesitates. "Sam was talking to me about Kansas."

Dean grows still, and inside his pockets his hands slowly uncurl from fists. For a moment he doesn't answer; he just breathes. "What did he tell you?" he says, at last. His voice is quiet.

Cas looks away and squints through the still-settling dust, his brow crinkling thoughtfully. "What he could remember," he says. "That is, not a great deal – but what he did recall, he… felt strongly about. He told me about what it was like – before. He told me about the way you used to live, the way your family was." He glances at Dean, very quickly, and then away again as though to pretend that it had never happened. "He told me about your mother."

Dean nods. "Right." He doesn't know what else to say to that. "Okay."

Staring down at the ground, Cas says softly, "I'm sorry that you lost her." The words are softly spoken, laced with what sounds like genuine sympathy, but Dean doesn't see how that's possible.

"Yeah, well," Dean says gruffly, and he folds his arms across his body. "Me, too, but – that's that. What does have you do with you interrogating my quality of life anyway?"

"My understanding of humanity made sense as far as the knowledge that your lives now are the same as they have always been. The realisation that your lives were difference once has… skewed my perception, to say the least." Cas fidgets with his hands. "I didn't realise that you had to settle."

This conversation is way over Dean's head for the early hour and the lack of the sleep; if he'd known that Cas was about to embark on a philosophical discussion of the meaning of life, he probably would've bailed out when Cassie did and left Sam to deal with this bullshit. "It's not so bad," he pacifies haltingly. "And you know how it goes – better to have had and lost than not to have had at all, or whatever the saying is."

Cas pauses. "I don't know that."

"I guess you haven't really had, either," Dean says, more to himself than to Cas, but he hears Cas let out a long, slow exhalation like he's deflating. Dean looks across, and finds Cas staring out into space with a crumple to his brow and mouth that is closer to a resignation than to a frown; he looks tired. Dean reaches out one hand to slap Cas' shoulder in an awkward gesture of solidarity. "Don't sweat it, man – you weren't missing much."

It's not true – Cas has essentially missed everything that matters, Dean thinks, but there's no easy way to tell someone that all the best parts of humanity are irrevocably lost to him, even to someone who doesn't have any real humanity to start with and who shouldn't theoretically care either way. There's something difficult to stomach about the shape of Cas' mouth when Dean says it though, and no matter how sternly Dean repeats internally that Cas doesn't care, he doesn't care, he doesn't know how to care, there is still the downwards-turned line of his mouth, as faint as the curve of the earth beneath their feet. Dean turns his back on it.

Cassie and Sam have siphoned the truck's gas and are eating the cookies from between the two seats in the cab, and they look over guiltily when Dean turns towards them. The sun is climbing over them, a sweaty yellow colour whose light is hazy like smoke. They have a way still to go before they get back to the rest of the squad.

"Come on," Dean says, and he smacks Cas, one more time, on the back now as he passes him. "Let's get out of here."

  


If Victor had been praying for more enemy contact, then it seems someone upstairs is listening. Once the squad re-groups after Warrant Officer Mills glides down to pick up the prisoners-of-war, they set out east again, and have barely been walking two hours before two small enemy ships hiss through the air above them, sleek metallic bodies winking brightly in the sun like two coins flipped high for heads or tails, followed several seconds later by a thunderous roar that shakes all the way through their bodies.

Almost before Dean's eyes can focus on them, they're far into the distance, flying west, and no more now than pale, glittering dots in the open blue sky.

"Holy shit," Charlie exclaims, and she tips her helmet back to better see the faint wisps of their smoke trails. She shields her eyes with one hand. "Looks like one of the old Chinese BX-504s from back from the early twenties' – I thought they weren't in operation any more?"

Gordon eyes her sceptically. "When was the last time you were in on a meeting on Chinese air force tactics?"

Charlie flushes defensively. "I like ships," she protests.

"Well. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that," Victor says mildly, "is ominous, at best."

"I'll call it in, sergeant," Garth offers, already fishing around in his webbing for his transmitter.

"Where do you think they're headed?" Kevin says as he stoops to re-tie his bootlaces, taking advantage of the momentary lull while everyone stares up at the sky.

"Hawaii?" Jo tries.

Bela rolls her eyes and makes a revolted sound in the back of her throat. "Hawaii is south. Those ships were going west. Unless they were stopping off in Sacramento to work on their tans, my bet is China. Now, shall we keep moving, or are in for a spot of midday cloud-gazing while we're here?"

Jo grumbles some unintelligible complaint in response, but they all get moving again. Kevin hastily knots his laces; Charlie takes a gulp of water from her canteen and gets Sam to help her stow it back in her webbing; Dean shifts the weight of his pack, the thin fabric of his undershirt peeling away sweaty from his skin when the straps move. For a second, as he jogs the pack higher up, all the weight of his equipment swings off-balance, and he tips clumsily forwards, but before he can fall, a hand grips his shoulder tight and holds him still.

"Thanks, Sammy," Dean says, as he shrugs more his pack more securely over his centre of gravity, and then he looks over and finds Cas – and his body is loose in that easy intimacy, the tilt of his shoulder almost touching Cas' chest, his face turned open-mouthed towards Cas in a way that doesn't flinch from physical closeness, not after twenty-three years perpetually flung together – and what shakes him, then, isn't the unexpected nearness, but the fact that it feels perfectly normal. "Dude," he says, at a loss for anything else to say, and with his breath rushing over Cas' mouth, he tries, "What the fuck—"

Cas' hand drops away.

Dean steps back, and he loudly clears his throat. "Thanks, man."

Cas nods. "My pleasure," he replies, and Dean is left with the flustered feeling that the phrasing is wildly inappropriate for the circumstances, although he can't put his finger on why, so he refuses to answer and just walks away to head off the patrol.

They head another couples miles across the brittle scrubland before the I-70 comes up ahead of them and twists languidly eastwards like a thick black snake, tarmac glittering dimly in the harsh light. Technically, it's poor patrol tactics to walk on the road, but after so many days trekking across the seemingly never-ending expanse of dry rock, with the dirt uneven and disintegrating beneath their feet, they're grateful for a flat surface – even if just for a little while. However, their luck holds out even further; shortly after noon, when they're tabbing along the road and Gordon is telling some obscene joke about the result of a priest and a prostitute walking into an airlock, Jo spots a cluster of low buildings, a few miles short of the horizon and on the main road.

It's the first actual town they've seen so far on the entire mission – albeit a very small one – so they waste no time catching up to it. Out of the dust and parched curls of foliage it rises like a mirage, the buildings squat and grimy, with shattered windows, the roads crumbling for lack of maintenance, but to the tired soldiers it looks close enough to paradise that they'll squint through the layers of dirt. There's a peeling billboard posted a couple hundred metres up the road from the first building, which declares emphatically that "There ain't no home like a home in Gnome", with a grubby side-note underneath that it hosts a population of less than a hundred people, which indicates that most people disagree.

Jo gives a mean laugh. "This place is called Gnome? Seriously?"

"Gnome sweet Gnome," Garth sings cheerfully.

"Looks like gnome-body lives here," Gordon chips in, and Charlie nearly keels over laughing at him.

"No way, that was terrible," she tells him, her face sunny with a grin, and he glares.

"I think you mean Gnome way," Dean corrects her – leading to Victor commenting drily that it's probably a goddamned street name here – and Gordon stomps off ahead, surly.

Victor gets them to spread out across the road, keep their spacing wide so that they can filter into buildings along the roadside. The first few are houses with dilapidated front steps and broken sash windows; further along the street are storefronts – grocers', bakers', butchers' – one small bank, and an old church. Beyond that is a motel with the bulbs of its electric sign gone, and an expansive parking lot, and then more houses and the road beyond. Dean moves towards the left sidewalk, turning his rifle into open doors and unlocked gates as he passes, calling back that it's clear.

"Hey, Dean, did you check in here?" Jo calls from behind him as she pulls open the unlocked front door to one of the houses and peers in, and then there's a hollow thud like the kick of a bass drum, and she stops. "What was—"

Dean rips away through the gate through which he was looking, one hand still pressed to the splintered wood of the jamb, and he yells, "Take cover!" but before the words have left his mouth, the shell hits.

The ground shudders; the blue of the sky is torn in two by a flash of fire and a thick black upwards twist of smoke. Dean's knees are knocked out from underneath him, and he is sent crashing to the concrete, and Jo turns, startled, to watch him fall, and so the first accompanying rattle of bullet only snags a hole in the sleeve of her combat suit instead of cutting her open.

"Shit," she exclaims, and she throws herself back hard against the wall of the nearest building, and Victor is yelling for them to take cover, a and all is smoke and chaos. Dean scrambles onto his feet and presses as flat as he can to the wall beside Jo, and he glances around wildly for Victor or any presence of command – but Victor is sitting on the sidewalk behind an abandoned car, with blood spilling out of his shin and blossoming a dark stain over the fabric of his pants. Dean swears under his breath. This town in the middle of nowhere, coming out of the dirt like a grubby Garden of Eden growing in red brick and concrete – of course it was going to be a goddamned trap.

Out of the cacophony comes Bela's voice: "Winchester?"

Dean coughs to clear his throat of the settling dust and yells back, "I'm here. Henriksen's hit – get Sam over to him, ASAP. We'll push up towards the grocer's! We'll have defilade in the alley there."

"Copy," Bela calls back.

"And someone get me Bradbury!" Dean shouts, as an afterthought, and then he ducks low, rifle pulled up ready – he cocks it, with a snap like the shutting of a bear-trap – and he runs.

As he goes, he hears again the angry spit of a mortar, and knows he has maybe five seconds. He pushes himself faster – five, four – and weaves between the parked cars – three, two – and he forces himself into a sprint so hard he feels he's about to fall flat on his face from it, and the shell hits the asphalt. The explosion is a deafening roar that has the ground jerking beneath Dean's feet from the impact, shaking all through his knees so that he stumbles, and only a hand thrown out blind to grope along the near wall keeps him upright.

Garth sprints past him, then, crowing, "No time for dilly-dallying, sarge!" and he disappears ahead of Dean into the Gnome grocery store's back access alley. Dean follows.

The squad amasses there, huddled in a corner with the thunder of the enemy trapping them like slugs in a salt maze, and mortar shells chug thirstily into the air to tear the earth apart. "Sergeant Talbot and Uriel, you can set up artillery from here – cover us while we get into position," Dean orders, and as they immediately begin unpacking their equipment, he turns to the others. "Fire-teams one and two as usual. I want two across to the far side of the road – see if you can find a way around the back of the motel. Has anyone actually sourced the enemy shots?"

He looks around; heads shake mutely in response.

"Christ." Dean exhales slowly. "Okay – fire-team two, over the road. Head around the motel and flank them. Radio into Talbot to switch fire when you're getting close. Fire-team one, you're with me, moving up the road to pin them down. Harvelle, you're gonna need to switch with Robinson and take fire-team IC. All clear?"

The answer comes back, "Clear, sergeant."

"Okay. Bradbury, you're with me. You ready, Talbot?" Dean shouts across to where Bela and Uriel are preparing the mortar ejector, and once he's got the go-ahead, he doesn't waste any more time with further instructions. They head out.

The first of their own mortars gives an echoing thunk of metal on metal before it hisses into the air, and as soon as it hits, the air thick with smoke and rubble, they move, fast. The rattle of gunfire is deafening, and they run, their footsteps overlapping in dim echoes as they hit the tarmac at a sprint – Dean yelling move, move, move – and they hurl themselves down into the dirt, one after the other, snap their weapons up to aim and let loose a staggered volley of shots that cut back the fire coming down on them, albeit temporarily, and the second team gets across the road without a single casualty.

Dean is tucked behind the wall of one house's porch, kneeling at the corner so that he has the choice to pop up over it to fire or to twist around the corner; over to his right are Charlie and Gabriel, tucked behind a badly-parked SUV with flat tires; beyond them is Cas, and past him, the others disappear. And they fire, and they fire, and every time Dean gives the order and one pair pops up to move forwards, there is a terrifying clatter of rounds at their heads and they are forced back into submission.

After several failed attempts, Dean tilts around the corner to look down the street, hoping in vain that maybe this time he'll be able to see anything – anything at all – that might give them some indication of what to do, or the very least where to aim. No such luck, however. Since the squad let themselves out into the open and began defending themselves, the enemy fire has dwindled down to next to nothing; they only fire when one of them dares to stick their heads up, and there's no chance to see any muzzle-flash or target indication – not unless they want their heads taken off.

Dean pulls back with a disgusted sound in the back of his throat, and he temporarily clicks the safety catch back onto his rifle – and it's a good thing, too, because at that moment Cas comes running into his line of sight, where Dean could have accidentally shot him. Cas is bent low and running towards Dean, and he comes to press against the wall of the porch with Dean.

"Can I help you?" Dean asks, a little irritably, because Cas is in the wrong place – although it's not as though it really matters, since pretty much everyone is in the wrong place.

"Yes," Cas says bluntly. "Are we going to move?"

Dean stares at him. "Yeah, Cas, I'd love to," he snaps. "Except maybe you haven't noticed, but we're a little tied up right now, what with the shells and the gunners on our asses."

"I can go. And the other Androids – the bullets won't—"

"Yeah," Dean says, and he can't believe he's actually having this conversation, "but don't you think that the enemy might get a little suspicious if suddenly we have fucking bulletproof soldiers?" He huffs out an exasperated breath and says, slowly and emphatically, "Cas, you're meant to top-secret. You keep the fuck down. We clear?"

Cas' jaw tightens with something like annoyance, and as obvious as it is that he thinks Dean's orders are bullshit, he doesn't question them. "We're clear," he says flatly.

"Good," Dean replies, and with that, he snaps the safety off his rifle and pops up to aim over the top barrier of the porch again.

He can spare about five seconds – five good, long seconds in which the world is still and quiet – before the indiscreet rattle of a machine-gun roars up again from somewhere in the rocks, and he has to flatten himself into the dust again.

"Shit," Dean breathes, and he flattens a hand over the crown of his helmet to shift it back away from his eyes. He drums his fingertips in a jagged rhythm against the metal of it. "They've got us pinned down and somehow we don't even know where they are," he mutters angrily. "This is bullshit – we're never gonna break through at this rate. And if the other squad flanks them and we haven't done shit, they're gonna get torn apart."

Cas flexes his fingers on the hand-guard of his rifle. He exhales sharply. "Perhaps if we—"

Cas' suggestion is probably a good one, but Dean stops listening. He crawls a couple feet over, away from where he last popped up over the top, shimmies sideways along the wall, and then pushes himself up to have a look – and again, has three, maybe four seconds to glimpse a grand total of absolutely nothing from the rest of the street before he has duck away again for fear of the machine-gun chatter starting up 's no good; those bursts of fire are never long enough for anyone to discern where they're shooting from, and certainly not when those same shots are aimed at their heads. If they keep going like this, nothing is going to happen, at least not in their favour. The enemy need to be drawn out longer, more clearly. They need a diversion.

Cas is still talking, in that monotone, masturbatory way that he does when he knows that no-one is listening but refuses to shut up anyway. "—so if we doubled back to the grocer's and tried to find another way around, we could—"

"Keep Charlie with you for radio. I'll be right back," Dean announces abruptly, and without a moment's delay, he drags himself up onto his feet and sprints across the road.

He doesn't hear whether Cas shouts after him, as he's frankly a little preoccupied with not being torn to shreds by the machine-guns that kick off as soon as he gets to his feet. He just throws one foot in front of the other as fast as he can, focusing on the space in front of him and the narrow alley that he's going to hurl himself into as soon as he gets close enough. He knows that he's done the right thing, though, because he can see the muzzle flash out of the corner of his eye, and even if he can't see it properly to identify its source, the rest of the squad can, and that's what matters – he just has to get to the other side of the road before he gets c2ut up, and fuck, he's so close, but his breath is ragged now and his muscles are cramping at the back of his calves from the sudden burst of the unanticipated strain to run faster and faster – and then he catches the tip of his toe on a crack in the tarmac and he stumbles sideways, and if he could spare any breath to talk, every word would be fuck, fuck, fuck, this is where I go down, except that somehow he makes it and slams into the brick wall of the alley so hard that all the wind is knocked out of him.

He presses his back flat against the wall with a gasp, and slides down it to sit on his heels as he catches his breath. Over on the other side of the road, he catches a glimpse of Cas staring at him with an expression so devoid of emotion that all its hollowness and empty spaces make him look absolutely livid.

Dean grins at him, and flashes two thumbs-up.

Cas looks away.

Dean doesn't have time to pander to Cas. He takes a second to heave dust-heavy oxygen back into his lungs, and then he staggers up onto his feet and, with his back still tight to the wall in case he's still in enemy line of fire and his knees weak to buckling at every step, he hurries the length of the alley to where the store cuts away to a grubby asphalt parking lot. There are deep, crumbling pits in the tarmac, broken down where vehicles have been rumbling back and forth in the years after road maintenance stopped entirely, and Dean crouches at the corner to peer across the lot before he heads out. The coast is clear.

He takes off running on shaky legs, jumping the broken tarmac rather than treading the gaps between the rubble, since he has no proven route and no way of knowing if the way is mined, and he heads past the motel to where he finds the second fire-team lying in prone position amongst the tatty, dead shrubbery of the motel's picnic area.

"Corporal!" he calls out as he skids to a halt beside Jo and, with the earth-shaking thud of another shell being spat out down the main road, he quickly gets down out of sight of the enemy. "Team one is only just starting to push up the street," he tells her, and the shell hits, raining chunks of brick and asphalt that clatter like pennies against the buildings' rooftops. "Just hold this position give it another couple minutes, wait until you get word from Bradbury." Once she nods, he props himself up onto his elbows to peer past her. "Fitzgerald, I want you waiting for word on team two progress. Tran and Inias, there's a position up on the motel's balcony where you could get good enfilade from, while you're waiting to push forwards."

They don't wait; they get going without question. Dean lies in the dirt, waiting for word, and somewhere between the seismic churn of the earth where the mortars strike and the hungry bone-rattle of gunfire, Charlie's voice comes through Garth's radio – it's time to go.

It goes like this: Bela and Uriel pull back the artillery, and the first fire-team splits – half of them switching fire left, the other half storming the church where the gunners are raining down metal – and Jo pushes the second fire-team hard past the makeshift barricade behind the butcher's where the enemy's light artillery gun is set up. The entirety of the contact takes just under forty minutes, and they come out with only two serious casualties: Victor takes a chunk of shrapnel to the shin, and Kevin gets shot in the shoulder, but Sam tends to them and they're both able to keep going regardless.

It feels like a good victory – they cram three of the enemy's own grenades down the muzzle of the artillery gun, confiscate all weapons, and call in three prisoners of war to Warrant Officer Mills overhead, who is thankfully only over Nova Scotia this time, and so says that she can be there within two hours. They check injuries and ammunition, refill their canteens, take on rations; Kevin updates his maps, and Charlie works on decoding the enemy intelligence found on the prisoners.

Dean watches the aftermath unfold – everyone busy, knowing their respective duties – and for a couple of minutes, as he fills Victor's command role, he has nothing to do except for this, looking over them and ensuring that they're all okay. It's a nice feeling; he pulls his canteen out of his webbing, but has barely got the cap off for a drink when he accidentally makes eye-contact with Cas across the re-org point. He lowers the bottle as Cas says something to Uriel, with whom he was originally speaking – presumably excusing himself – and makes his way across to Dean in short, aggressive strides.

"How can I help you, Cas?" Dean starts, with perfect cheeriness, before Cas can get a single derogatory word out.

"I just have one question," Cas says sharply as he storms towards Dean with hard eyes and his jaw a tight line, and he only stops when he's so close that his body is one tilt from being pressed against Dean's. "Are you out of your mind?"

Dean laughs, although he doesn't back down from Cas' attempt at intimidation. He lifts his canteen to his mouth and pauses with the rim pressed to his lower lip. "I'm sorry?"

"Your reckless little stunt with the machine-gunners, to be specific," Cas says.

"Oh, that!" Dean grins, and when he glances over at Garth and Gordon to find them laughing as well, because some things are terrible during warfare and terrible when it's over, and some things are stupid and life-threatening at the time and then hilarious afterwards – and a spontaneous suicide-sprint across a four-lane highway in front of unidentified gunners, with Dean probably wearing an expression like he was going to shit his pants the whole across, is pretty fucking hilarious, if Dean says so himself. He takes a long gulp from his canteen and turns back to Cas, beaming. "Oh, man, that was great – well, I mean, it kind of sucked, but it got the job done and dude, you should have seen your face, I thought you were gonna—"

"You think it's funny," Cas throws out tonelessly. "Or have you really so little regard for your own life that doing it didn't matter to you?"

Dean snorts, with disbelief rather than with humour, because he doesn't know exactly what Cas' problem is, but it's kind of harshing his buzz. "Well, someone had to do it," he says. "We weren't going to get anywhere otherwise."

"No," Cas says sharply. "I offered to do something similar – or for any of the Androids to do something similar, because we have the physical capacity to perform such roles and create such diversions with minimum risk to our own existence, and because you do not. You forget, I think, that we're designed to be physically and intellectually superior—"

Dean recoils with a frown. Either he's missed something here, or this conversation has just taken a turn for the personal. "And I think you're forgetting here that all your physical and mental superiority has still got you no rank, and I'm in command right now," he says irritably, "so maybe you should try shutting your goddamned—"

"The reason we exist," Cas goes on, raising his voice like he's going to throw some petty tantrum, "is because we can do things that human beings cannot. There were alternatives, but you didn't stop to think because you don't think—"

Dean's eyes narrow. "I think that's maybe a little rich coming from the goddamned cyborg--"

"You're already injured from the previous engagement, and yet you rush in," Cas continues, raising his voice over Dean's inane contributions to the argument, "and throw yourself into the middle of things and expect to come out gleaming like a hero every time. What if one day you don't?"

For a second Dean has nothing to say. He just stares at Cas. "Oh my god," he says slowly, the reality of the conversation hitting him – this is personal. "Are you actually… mad at me?"

Cas squints. "What?"

"Holy shit, you are," Dean says, an incredulous grin stretching across his face, and he shakes his head in disbelief as he takes a step back away from Cas, as though to take him in. "I don't believe this – you're mad at me."

"I'm not," Cas retorts, but there it is – even at Dean's idiotic antics, telling him he's mad, there's a flicker of irritation through Cas' mouth where his lips press thin together. "I don't know what you mean."

"Sure you do," Dean says, and he swings back forwards to crowd up into Cas' space again. "Look at you. You wanna yell at me, right? Tell me I'm an asshole and a waste of cells and oxygen or whatever the hell else it is humans are made up of—"

"Carbon, mostly," Cas says automatically.

"Hell, maybe you even want to hit me! Right?" Dean says. He's up close in Cas' space in an attempt to provoke him, start a fight or something – close enough that he can see the red dust caught on his eyelashes, the pale sheen of sweat on his temples from the heat, the darker circles of blue around his pupils – but after dancing around like an idiot up in his face proves useless, Dean puts up both his hands on Cas' shoulders and pushes him back, hard enough that he stumbles. "Right?"

"Stop that," Cas grits out as he straightens up, glaring.

"Why? Am I pissing you off?" Dean pushes him again, harder.

"Stop it!" Cas snaps, and his own hands fly up defensive to grab two fistfuls of Dean's combat suit and shoves him hard – except Cas is engineered to be faster and stronger than human beings, and Dean ends up falling flat onto his ass and skidding along in the dirt.

Behind him, Dean can hear silence fall over the rest of the squad as all their attention is drawn to their temporary commander and his assigned Android getting into some kind of surreal fist-fight.

When Dean sits up, he's grinning wider than ever. "You feel better?"

Cas exhales in a sharp burst. "I don't understand."

Dean gets to his feet with a wince – he's more than likely going to have one hell of a bruise on his ass – and walks back towards Cas. "Let me spell it out for you," he says, his voice hard, and he reaches out to tap the knuckles of his fist against Cas' chest, just twice, in a gesture as condescending as it is mean. "I was right. Under all the bluster and bravado and pseudo-human metal plating, you actually care."

Cas doesn't answer. Dean comes to a stop in front of him and looks him over. Dean would say that he looks like he's shot someone, except that he's seen him actually shoot people without a moment's hesitation; he looks almost spooked, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly slack. More than anything, he looks human.

  


"Okay, do you have any… fives?"

Kevin flicks through his hand of cards, squinting through the dark as he tilts them closer to the dim red glow of the tactical flashlight set up on the ground. "Uh, hang on," he says. "Is that a – no, that's a nine. Sorry, go fish."

Dean grumbles and leans across to dig through the deck.

It's coming up to oh-four-hundred, with the sky pitch-black and fading all the desert's colours to monochrome, and the squad is camped out in the open, having found no better shelter to set up as a harbour area than one large rock and a bare-branched ocotillo tree. They're closer day by day to the border of Colorado, where Victor suspects they'll start seeing more enemy patrols and potentially getting into heavier conflicts, but at least then they'll be able to set up some of the cameras that that have been weighing down their packs for the past two weeks.

Most of the squad are already fast asleep, except Dean and Kevin, the lucky guys who drew this sentry slot. They're supposed to be a roaming sentry, circling the sleeping soldiers to ensure their safety from all sides, but nothing interesting has happened in forty minutes, and Kevin has a pack of cards.

Kevin drums his fingertips idly on his knee as he frowns down at his cards. "How about a three?" he asks.

"Motherfuck." Dean sighs, pulls three cards out of his hand, and sourly thrusts them at Kevin, who just gives a small, delighted whoop and giggles too himself, tongue tucked between his teeth as he sets down his four cards.

Dean sits back and rolls his shoulders until they pop. "We should probably do another patrol," he says, with no real eagerness for the prospect, and he looks back towards the camp as though expecting some clear indicator of enemy presence nearby. "Uphold the peace, protect the innocent, et cetera…"

Kevin snorts. "I don't think anyone in there is particularly peaceful or innocent." He glances at his watch. "Actually, it's nearly the end of my shift anyway."

"What – no, come on, don't be a loser," Dean complains. "You gotta stay out here and be my friend, man, it's so fucking boring out here."

"I've been up an hour and a half already," Kevin tells him, grinning. "We're not that good friends. I'm going back to bed." He stretches out his arms behind his back, clicks his neck to one side, and then climbs to his feet. "Keep the cards. You want to do one last patrol before I head in?"

"Fine." Dean collects all the cards into the main deck, tucks them into a pocket of his combat jacket, and gets up. He grabs the red flashlight and jerks its dim beam back towards the camp. "Let's go, then."

They trudge slowly around the perimeter of the sleeping bodies, twice, and expanding their circle the second time, and then they come to a halt where they were previously sitting, and Kevin unloads his rifle.

"Who's on next?" Dean asks as he watches Kevin run through his safety procedures.

"Uh, not sure – give me a second." Once his weapon is made safe, Kevin digs in his pocket and pulls out a crumpled scrap of paper on which the whole sentry rota is written. "Jo," he says at last, after squinting at it by the glow of the flashlight, and then he passes the paper over. "I'll send her over in a second. You gonna be okay on your own for ten seconds, sergeant?"

Dean grimaces theatrically. "It's scary out here, Kevin, but I guess I'll manage somehow."

Kevin laughs and heads away into the dark, and Dean is left alone.

It's a chill night, just cold enough to warrant Dean wearing a fleece sweater over his combats. He turns up his collar and tucks his chin down into the warm fabric while he waits. The sky is clear as glass, coloured a dusty dark grey that bruises into milky purples at the crescent moon's outer edge. He scuffs his toe through the dirt.

"Dean?"

He turns, startled, and finds coming up behind him not Jo, but Cas. He's not wearing any warm kit, but has his helmet buckled securely onto his head, so tight as to make Dean think that he's expecting a bomb to go off imminently. He stops several feet away from Dean, maybe a little taken aback by Dean's bewildered reaction.

"Where's Jo?" Dean asks.

"She had some urgent feminine matters to attend to," Cas says. "She powered me up instead."

Dean frowns. "That's no really fair. Surely you also need to recharge, or whatever, as well…"

There's a prolonged silence, and although it's too dark to distinguish any expression on Cas' face, but Dean's willing to bet money on it being that scrunched-up scowl. "The Android Angeles are fuel-based," he says. "We don't run on electricity."

"Yeah – I mean, I know, I just meant—"

Cas tilts his head.

"Never mind," Dean mutters. He sticks both hands into the pockets of his pants, leaving the head of the flashlight still slightly poking out, and he puffs out a long, slow breath. Cas doesn't say any more.

They're still a good five yards apart, Cas having paused away from Dean, and even with such a gap between them, stringing words into a clumsy bridge, Dean is for some reason acutely aware of the fact that they are alone – together, which is probably weirder than being actually alone, because here it's just Dean and Cas unsupervised in the dark. He can hear Cas breathing.

Cas shifts his weight from one foot to the other and adjusts his rifle in its sling. "Shall we patrol around?" he suggests.

Dean nods. "Good idea."

They set off in the usual circle, walking slowly.

"So, uh…" Dean starts awkwardly, and for all his strained attempt at nonchalance, his voice comes out bizarrely high-pitched. He becomes acutely aware of his own hands, and isn't sure what to do with them. Hands in pockets doesn't feel right, but when he removes them and leaves them swinging casually by his side, he feels like an idiot. He tries tucking his thumbs into his belt-loops – too Clint Eastwood – and settles for folding his arms across his chest. "How you doing?"

Cas looks across at him dubiously. "I'm functioning normally," he says, disjointedly, as though the conversation isn't coming easily to him either. He pauses, and then adds, "I do have a problem with the decreased elasticity of the cables at the back of one of my knees, but in the morning I intend to ask Gordon if it can be repaired."

"Oh." Out of curiosity, Dean glances at Cas' knee to see if there's anything noticeably wrong with it. Cas walks a little heavily, maybe, but he's not actually limping or anything. Still, if Cas says there's a problem – Dean realises he's staring. He frowns, and looks forwards instead as they continue their circle of the camp, and he digs for something insightful to say. "That sucks," he says, and after another moment's hesitation, "Sorry, man."

Cas shoots him another weird look. "It wasn't your fault."

"No, I know – dude." Dean rolls his eyes. "I wasn't actually apologising like I'd done anything wrong. I was just, I don't know, sympathising with something shitty."

Cas' eyes narrow. "Because you feel responsible?"

Dean exhales sharply, and he tips his head back to lift his eyes heavenwards as though expecting help to come from above. "No," he says, with slow, emphatic annoyance, because he doesn't know how else to express his own sentimentality towards Cas, "because I feel empathy, jackass. That in your database?"

As soon as the words are out of Dean's mouth, he regrets them; Cas' confusion is genuine, and there's no need to be such an asshole. All the same, his heart is beating a nervous staccato at their proximity, alone in the dark, and the fear of the way his stomach pitches when Cas looks at him has turned his mouth hard and mean, and he doesn't know how to fix it.

He slows his pace, letting Cas get ahead of him in the patrol, and he takes a moment to try and find an apology for his shitty behaviour as he scans the red glow of the flashlight over the sleeping soldiers to his left. For the most part, everyone is quiet and restful; Kevin squirms a little in his sleeping-bag, probably unable to get to sleep after having been alert for an hour and a half on sentry duty; Bela mumbles to herself; the rest of the Androids sit bolt upright with their eyes closed as though in meditation. Dean swings the flashlight away again.

Before Dean can say anything in apology, however, Cas turns back to face Dean and demands, "Have I wronged you somehow?"

Dean stares at him. "What?"

"Recently, when you speak to me, you display reticence bordering on hostility," Cas says, in his usual matter-of-fact tone. He squints outwards through the dark, his mouth scrunching up thoughtfully. "Your body language is closed, as well."

Dean opens his mouth to argue the fact before he realises that he currently has his arms folded across his body. He uncrosses his arms. The flashlight jingles idly at his side.

"Is there something I should apologise for?" Cas goes on. "In the literal sense, that is – not because of any duty to—"

"You don't have anything to apologise for," Dean interrupts.

Cas looks away. He turns his head out towards the open expanse of desert that fades from dim and blurry monochromes to indistinct shadows blending into darkness. His lips press into a hard, tight line, and Dean's no expert on body language like the Android Angeles clearly are, but he'd risk money on saying that there's something Cas is trying not to say.

"What?" Dean says, not as much a question as it is a challenge.

Cas doesn't answer. He breathes slowly, in and out. His profile is made up of all hard lines in the dim light offered by the pale knife-sliver of moonlight and the dusty sprinkling of stars; the straight slope of his nose is cut out like white paper against the darkness behind him.

"Cas, what is it?"

"You were right the other day," Cas says, picking his words delicately. "I was… wrathful."

Dean raises his eyebrows. "Wrathful?" he repeats incredulously.

"Angry."

"I know what wrathful means," Dean starts grumpily, but he cuts himself off. "Jesus – just – never mind." He takes a deep breath. "So… what? You admit that you can feel stuff?"

Cas doesn't seem to be listening; he's still stuck on his contemplation of Dean's annoyance, and as he continues to stare out into the distance, he says distractedly, "Perhaps when I responded to your provocations, I pushed you too hard. I shouldn't have snapped."

"So do you actually other stuff, besides anger, or…?" Dean tries, setting out to close the space between them since Cas walked on without him.

"Harsh words were spoken," Cas says with a nod that is decisively remorseful. "It may be in this way that I've irritated you, and for that I—"

"You're irritating me right now," Dean grumbles as he comes to a stop in front of Cas – who doesn't even seem to notice that he's there. "Dude, I'm trying to get to the bottom of something. Can you not just shut the fuck up about the goddamned—"

"My actions were not planned." Cas inhales deeply. "I merely acted in response to what I felt was—"

"Cas," Dean says sharply.

Cas looks at him. His eyes are tired.

Dean realises that he's misjudged the distance - now, with Cas facing him, the space between them is nowhere near what he had anticipated when Cas was turned the other way. Cas is at less than arms' length; even in only starlight and the faint beam of red tactical light, Dean can pick out the creases that spider out from the corners of his eyes, the crinkle between his eyebrows, the sad upper bow of his mouth. Dean notices his mouth.

"Right this second," Dean says, his tongue dry as he speaks so that his voice comes out hoarse, and slowly, his eyes find their way back up from Cas' lips, "right now – how do you feel?" He hesitates, then, and clarifies, "I mean – do you… feel?"

Cas' eyebrows lift a little in the middle, a crease deepening across his forehead like his whole face is about to crumple into defeat, and with his eyes flickering all across Dean's face – to his eyes, his mouth, his cheek, his mouth, his mouth – and he tilts forwards with his own lips part like there's something fluttering in his throat to get out, and then he says, "I don't know."

He turns away.

Dean sighs, and as Cas starts up walking once more, he jogs after him. "Come on, man, work with me here," he insists, falling into step with Cas, and he peers across at him intently.

"I don't know," Cas repeats, slowing his words into separate, emphatic units. He continues speaking, and he does so rapidly, then, all his words crashing into each other with bewildering urgency. "Uncertainty is, in itself, an emotion – or at least, some confused indicator of other, less distinct emotions – all of with which I was not originally programmed. The very fact that I can be unsure of my own state of mind should tell you what you want to know, Dean. We Android Angeles were designed to be infallible, Dean, and I—"

He stops short again, both in conversation and in movement, breathless as though all his air had been abruptly snatched from him, and his eyes, when they find Dean's, are scared.

He swallows once before continuing to speak. His voice is quiet. "I feel fallible."

Dean feels again, just as he had moments ago when he asked if Cas could feel, that there is something precariously balanced between them, something built all out of dim light and porcelain, and Dean doesn't know which words will tip it over and which will hold it steady just that little bit longer – long enough for the both of them to find their footing. Dean's mouth is open, but no words are coming out; he just looks at Cas with his own blood thunderous inside his head and his throat crushed tight so that he doesn't think he could speak even if he knew what to say.

Cas moves to leave again, to resume walking just as before, and Dean doesn't know how many of these stop-start revelations he can handle in a single patrol, so he reaches out and grabs a handful of Cas' sleeve, and he holds him still. "Dude, just—" Dean breathes in. He says, "Stop. Stop moving, stop… talking, just stop everything. Don't sweat it. Okay? Everything's gonna be fine."

Cas makes no outright denial of this, but he gives a sigh that slumps his whole posture, and he starts, "I don't know if I've yet impressed upon you the gravity of the situation. Somewhere along the line, Doctor Niehammer has succeeded in electronically replicating some approximation of the human soul. Granted, I'm an anomaly, and by no means an example of the perfect Android, but in the long-term, the foundations for some potentially devastating technology have been laid, if advertently – and—"

Dean's hand is still curled into the fabric of Cas' jacket. "And in the short-term?"

Cas keeps his eyes lowered. "In the short-term, the most likely probability is that upon my return to base, my electronic feedback will be analysed for a functionality report, and I'll be discovered and then…" Cas won't look at Dean. He jerks his shoulders in a way that is exaggeratedly careless and non-committal to the point of falseness, and he twists his head away to look past Dean. "Then, presumably, I'll be shut down."

Whatever Dean had originally been expecting, it wasn't this. His hand drops from Cas' clothes, and he recoils back a step like he's been punched. "What?"

"Regardless of whether or not Doctor Niehammer would want to analyse me in order to understand how my existence as sentient is possible, I would definitely be seen as a very dangerous bug in a very delicate and carefully calibrated system, which allows no room for anomalies," Cas says in the emotionless tones of someone who has long since come to terms with the fact. "She'll want me destroyed."

"But—" Dean struggles to organise his thoughts into any semblance of a structure that makes sense, and comes up empty, repeating the same thing over and over: "But – but – no, Cas, but – I thought she was just gonna try and fix you."

"In fixing me my faults, she would repair and make typical all that makes me different," Cas says, with a resolute despondency, and he looks tiredly across at Dean again as he clarifies, "All that makes me think and feel and care… And all of myself that has been so far functioning with those defects would be gone."

Dean lets out a breath that deflates him, shoulders to stomach, and he feels small. "Oh."

"My body might come back, but I wouldn't," Cas says. "Or at least, not as you know me."

In spite of everything – the severity of the conversation and of the truth about Cas' reality as it runs parallel to Dean's own, a fingerbreadth away and never quite touching, and in spite of the weight on Dean's back that every time he speaks to Cas or even looks at him, there is something intangible that passes between them that crackles a little closer each time to breakdown – the joke that pops into Dean's head is too easy to pass up. It's stupid, but he feels like he needs something to undermine the general tone of their discussion, before his head explodes, and so Dean can't help himself from grinning like an idiot and adding, "Biblically," with a seductive eyebrow-raise.

Cas doesn't smile. "Dean."

"Look, Cas, we just won't let her get you, okay?" Dean says, frustration cutting his tone to hardness, because he's trying to lighten the mood and Cas won't let him, and even he knows that there is no guarantee to what he says. All he knows is that somewhere along the line he's come to this place within himself where Cas is human, or something close, and he's nestled alongside Sam inside Dean's chest, and Naomi Niehammer's manicured little talons can pry all they want at his ribcage, but Cas is there for good.

Cas lets out a long breath that is ragged with frustration. "I don't think you understand—"

"Don't patronise me," Dean cuts across him. "I understand perfectly. But the fact is that I'm not gonna let that happen. Not today, not ever."

Cas doesn't look so sure. He drops his chin down into his chest to look at the floor, his expression one that says clearly that he doesn't believe Dean, but is unwilling to say so. He shrugs again, and his hands twitch by his sides as though he doesn't know what to do with them. He looks over his shoulder at the direction in which they were originally patrolling, but neither of them give a shit for that anymore. It's not like there's anyone out here except for them. It's not like anything else matters.

Dean looks at him for a moment, without speaking. Then, he holds out one hand towards Cas and says, "Come here."

Cas eyes him sceptically, but takes one step closer, and then another, and he watches with eyes that are uncertain as Dean reaches out and takes Cas' hand in his own. "What are we doing?" Cas asks, studying Dean as he messes around with Cas' fingers until he presses Cas' knuckles down to form a fist, except for his little finger poking out.

"I'm letting you into a super sacred human bond of trust," Dean says. "Ask any third-grader." He links his own little finger around Cas', and squeezes as tight as he can. When Cas looks up at Dean's face, Dean gives him a look with all the calm solemnity of a monarch knighting their loyal subject. He clears his throat authoritatively, and lifts their hands together so that they're twisted together between their chest. "Now – Cas. I hereby pinkie-promise that I am not gonna let anything bad happen to you."

Cas stares silently at their entwined hands.

Dean tips his head forwards, tilts it a little to one side so that he can force Cas to meet his gaze, and slowly, reluctantly, Cas' eyes flicker up to Dean's. "Okay?" Dean prompts.

Cas swallows. "Okay."

Dean stretches across and slaps his free hand warmly to Cas' shoulder, squeezing his upper arm, and holds him at arms' length with a smile. "I've got you," he tells him, eyebrows raised. "Understand? I'm gonna take care of all this – and you know, of you, too. Anything you need, and I'll do it."

As Dean looks at him through the dark, something changes in Cas' face. All the hard lines and sharp edges fade entirely, and if he's tired and creased now, it's like old cotton rather than battered steel, and his lips part, and he blinks quickly, just once, like he's worried that everything around him will disappear if he looks away for a single second. The dim moon picks out the round curve of his lower lip, casts shadows underneath, and Dean has the faint impression that the words inside Cas' mouth are so close to bursting out from him that he can almost them between his parted lips.

Dean swallows, nervous. "What?"

The words, when Cas says them, are, "You'd do anything for me."

Dean shifts awkwardly, the statement more direct than he really knows how to deal with, but he doesn't look away; his hand moves so that, with pinkies still linked, their knuckles bump together, and without realising, Dean's thumb skims over the heel of Cas' hand. "Well," he says. "Yeah, I guess. I mean – what exactly are you thinking?"

Cas disregards this entirely, and, in a voice as soft and hesitant as his fingers brushing over Dean's, just says, "Dean – am I family?"

For a moment, Dean doesn't know what to say. He knows what Cas is talking about, of course – that night they'd been walking back from the first enemy conflict, Dean with a hole in his stomach and Cas with his arm around Dean's waist, when Dean had realised for the first time that Cas could and did care, and he'd talked about family being something you build, not something you find – but he doesn't know how to reconcile in as many words that Cas is a part of that now.

He starts with, "Uh," and his voice comes out rough, and then he goes onto, "Yeah." His throat hurts, his mouth gone dirt-dry, and he is still holding Cas' hand in a night that is cool and still, and there is something agitated in the pits of his stomach that makes it hard to breathe. "Yeah, Cas. You're family."

He lets go of Cas' hand.

As Dean takes a step back, the chill air of the evening is cold on his fingers where they were previously interwoven snugly with Cas', and he clenches his hand into a fist until the feeling goes away. He exhales shakily.

"What's wrong?" Cas says.

"Huh?" Dean rubs a hand over his mouth. "Nothing. Nothing's wrong. What's wrong with you?"

Cas scrutinises Dean. "You're distressed by this – by my being family."

"Well." There's no point in lying; Dean knows that since Cas was theoretically designed without empathy, he instead has a keen ability to interpret body language, tone of voice, and when someone is, in general, being a moody son of a bitch. "Yeah, I am, a little. I mean. You're – you know." Dean waves his hands ambiguously in front of him. "And I'm." He throws one hand up and lets them fall back against his sides. "Yeah."

Cas blinks. "Humans often have non-human companions," he says, completely matter-of-fact about it. "Sam told me once you had a dog—"

"You're not a fucking dog," Dean snaps, and realises too late that he's raised his voice, and that bodies are stirring within the camp. He glances over towards them, but sees that thankfully no-one was actually woken by his outburst, and he turns back to Cas to hiss, "You're not a pet, Cas. You're—" Dean gestures hopelessly at him with one flattened hand. He sighs. "What the fuck even are you?" he mutters, and with that, he stomps away, the red flashlight levelled decisively at the ground in front of him.

"I don't know," Cas says, trailing after him, a couple steps behind.

"Right. Me neither. So where does that leave us?"

Cas frowns. "About fifty miles west of the Colorado border."

Dean huffs all his breath out in a sour sound just short of a laugh. "Sure." He shakes his head. "Forget it, Cas – let's just… patrol." He doesn't know what it is about standing close to Cas with hands touching that shakes him all through and leaves his breath choked with something that treads an unclear line between fear and nausea. He tosses the flashlight from one hand to the other, and adjusts his rifle so that it no longer hangs behind his hip but in front of his body in a position that's more readily available for quick use.

Cas mimics him, also getting into a more battle-ready stance despite the fact that there's nothing around for mils upon miles, and together they settle back into the roaming patrol they were meant to be doing all along.

They walk in ever-widening circles under the night's shifting black and foamy cloud-lilac, without a sound between them but their breath in syncopation and the crunch of their boots in the dirt, and they don't speak, but they look at each other. Dean looks at Cas first, and then studiously ignores him for several minutes; Cas glances over regularly, the movement of his head clear in Dean's peripheral vision, and Dean pretends he can't see it. He only looks over once Cas has stopped looking. He has enough weight on his shoulders without Cas looking at him like he built the world with his bare hands. Dean doesn't think about it. He doesn't think about his mouth.


	4. Chapter 4

It's lunch-time on the border of Colorado, and the sun is high in the sky with a dusty yellow light, and the squad are slouched back in the shade of a small sandstone bluff.

"You guys," Charlie starts, and then she stops. She looks down at her hands and continues fiddling with the wires at the back of her communications unit.

"What?" Dean asks.

Charlie hesitates. "It's nothing," she says at last. She retrieves a screwdriver from her toolkit and spends a moment with it held in one hand, looking down at the tangle of wire between the metal brackets. She stays silent a moment longer, but then seems unable to help herself and bursts out, "Do you guys ever think, like… maybe there's more to the Androids than we think there is? More than there should be?"

Bela laughs. "Um, no."

Charlie glares at him. "I'm serious, Bela. I mean… just – sort of think about it, right?" She sets down her comms unit to better gesture with both hands, and looks around at all of them. "They're like clones. No – worse than clones. Their every movement, every gesture, is programmed into their brains before they were even conscious, if you could even really call them conscious." She ticks off her a fingers like a list: "They don't have original thoughts, they don't understand the words they're saying, they don't decide what to do, how to move – it's all programmed. Nothing is individual, at all. I mean, obviously they've been designed to look like separate people, with different faces and bodies, but they're just machines. They should all be inherently identical."

Gordon stabs a piece of C-ration mystery meat into his mouth. "So?"

Charlie bristles as though the idea that she hasn't yet got her point across is preposterous. "So? So – so they're not!" She glances wildly between them all again, desperately in search of anyone to back her up; Dean carefully avoids her eyes. "They have personalities – don't they? You guys must feel it too. They're all different!"

"Charlie," Cassie says softly, with the tone of someone consoling a child who is close to a tantrum. "They're just robots."

Charlie looks at her with eyes that plead her to understand. "But I don't think they are," she insists.

Kevin grimaces. "It's a nice idea, Charlie… but I don't think so."

"Besides, how would that even be possible?" Gordon asks.

She sits back heavily against the jut of red rock behind her. "I don't know," she says sourly. "You're the mechanic – you tell me."

"Right. I'm the mechanic," Gordon says, and he points his fork at her, complete with mystery meat still impaled on the end, "and I'm telling you, it's impossible. Like you said, they don't have brains, they don't have their own thoughts… honestly, they wouldn't know what to do with autonomy if they had it – which, by the way," he jabs his fork emphatically in her direction, "they don't."

Charlie turns sharply away from him. "Fine," she says. "We've had the mechanic's perspective. Now – let's have the scientist's. Sam?"

Startled to be called upon in the argument, Sam jumps and nearly knocks over the contents of his medical kit that he had so meticulously been rearranging. "Huh?"

She tilts her chin up imperiously and asks, "Sam, where's the soul?"

Sam looks between Charlie and Gordon with bewilderment. Slowly, he sets down the materials he'd been tidying and straightens up. "Sorry?"

"The soul," she prompts again, and in the background, Gordon makes a low noise of annoyance. "Where is it?"

Sam stares at her for a second, and then jerks his shoulder in a non-committal kind of shrug. "I don't know." He goes on, "By all scientific understanding, there isn't one."

"Right." Charlie turns back to Gordon with triumph written all over her face. "And yet here we are: thinking, feeling – debating whether we think and feel, even! No-one knows what the soul is or where it comes from. Things like pain, sure, and temperature – we know that the Androids don't have those, because they're just machinery. But feelings, independent thought… who's to say? If human beings can just pull free will out of nowhere, out of a mass of organs and meat, then who's to say it isn't there in all their metal?"

"There isn't," Gordon mutters, determined as ever to have the last word, but it's obvious that Charlie has already considered the debate a success for her, and she leans forwards to further engage Sam in a discussion about the philosophy of the existence of the soul. Sam's eyes find Dean's.

Dean, who has remained very quiet for the duration of that entire conversation, only moves now, once he is sure that it won't attract attention to him. Sam is talking; all eyes are focused on him, even if Sam's own eyes are unflinchingly fixed on Dean in a pointed expression that he thinks Dean should be the authoritative voice on this subject. Dean ignores it.

He stretches his legs out in front of him and then climbs to his feet, mumbling something about needing to piss. However, as he walks away, he pauses briefly some ten feet or so away, where the Androids are gathered to relax. Most of them are sitting on the ground, similarly to the soldiers on the other side of the jutting rock, their legs sprawled out or tucked underneath them, heads propped back against whatever comfortable surfaces they can find; some are standing with that awkward mechanical stiffness which betrays that comfort is irrelevant to them, and that they could just as easily stand sentinel for hours on end until they're next needed.

Cas is sat at the base of a sweet acacia tree, his knees pulled up in front of him; he squints in the harsh light, and his face screws up a little because of it. As Dean hesitates at the mouth of the space the Androids fill, Cas looks up and, seeing Dean there, he almost smiles. Almost – Dean isn't sure that Cas knows how to smile, but his face relaxes, his eyebrows lifting, and one corner of his mouth pulls up awkwardly.

Dean turns away and keeps walking.

  


Dean keeps away from Cas. It is, he decides, the only sensible option, because Cas' words of confused emotion spin endlessly through his head, and he's noticing things now – not new things, nothing having changed, but things that have crept insidiously into his life and dug their teeth in with a startling permanency. What Dean used to brush off, with the safe, comfortable knowledge that Cas was a stupid piece of semi-sentient engineering incapable of understanding what his words and actions really meant, now settle with him, heavy as sandbags.

Every time he opens his mouth to say a word to Cas – whether for a real conversation, or even just something as mundane as "dude, pass me the oil rag" – somehow things get twisted into speaking in muted tones, voice lowered as though his every syllable is a secret; they end up falling into eye contact that lingers and the accidental brush of hands. Dean absently stretches his legs out into Cas' space while he's eating on evening, and Cas settles one hand lightly on Dean's ankle, and neither of them think anything of it until Sam looks at them peculiarly. In short, things between them get weird, and Dean, for once, is getting tired of finding reasons to look at Cas' mouth. His answer is not to look at Cas at all.

There is a new problem, however, in the way that Sam and Cas are apparently friends now. Since whatever conversation they had about what life used to be like in Kansas before the earth got torn apart, they've started hanging out; sometimes, in free moments, Cas even moves to deliberately seek out Sam's company, where he would usually have either gone to Dean or just hung out awkwardly with the other Androids. Dean's not jealous – he and Sam are so close that in a strange way it just feels like Cas is getting to know another side of Dean – but the feeling is still a strange one, something that his instinct tells him to present as irritation with them but which sits closer to fear. His chest clenches; something turns anxiously over in his stomach. Cas smiles at Sam.

They're heading along the mouth of a sandstone gorge when, out of nowhere, Sam starts hysterically laughing to himself. "Wait, I've got it," he says between giggles, and when Dean turns back to look at him as he walks, he sees Sam giving Cas a grin so broad it seems to crack at the seams of his mouth, and they must have been some joke-related conversation earlier that went over Cas' head because he asks now, with total solemnity, "Cas – what's black and white and red all over?"

Dean glances at Cas, who walks ahead of Sam, one step behind Dean and to his left, and whose brow furrows into deep concentration, a look that Dean has now come to recognise as the sign that Cas is going through his extensive database.

Dean huffs exasperatedly and nudges him with his elbow. "Dude, it's a joke, not a pop quiz," he says. "Don't overthink it."

Cas stares at him – a little too long, Dean thinks, with a flustered heat lifting from his jawline – and his eyes are steady, like he's taking in every word Dean says as an instruction and a life-lesson, and then he looks back attentively at Sam instead.

"A newspaper," Sam tells him, and a unanimous groan lifts from the others – except for Cas. Cas laughs.

As Dean watches on in amazement, Cas' face spreads into a wide, gummy smile. "I understand," he says with what could only be described as delight. He looks around at them all, still beaming. "It's a pun – using the word 'red' both as the colour and the past tense of the verb 'to read'," he explains, as though he thinks by their apparent lack of hysteria over the joke that they somehow didn't understand it. "But the placement of the pun alongside two other colour words provokes the assumption that 'red' is also a colour word, when it in fact refers—"

"We know, Cas," Sam says, with the fond exasperation of a parent humouring their excitable toddler. "Don't ruin the moment."

"It was very clever," Cas says earnestly, and his smile fades, but there are still traces of it at the corners of his mouth. It makes him look tired, somehow; it eases the furrow of his brow, but the dim crease of it remains like an echo, and the etchings of crows' feet are brought out beside his eyes. "Thank you, Sam."

Sam looks touched by Cas' sincerity, if a bit amused by the whole exchange. "Don't worry about it," he says, and he reaches out to touch Cas' hand. Something about thickens in that back of Dean's throat in a way that he hasn't felt since he was very young – and Cas looks across at Dean, then, as though for some confirmation or approval that he's doing the right thing. Look, he seems to say: Sam is reaching out to me, like being touched by Sam, even in such a gentle, casual way is similar to being allowed to pet a wild horse, and there's so much pride and straight-forward joy in his expression that Dean can't look at him. His breath comes a little tight in his throat, and something in his chest twists painfully. He faces the front.

"Don't give up the day job, Sammy," he calls back.

Sam just laughs at that, and from up ahead Jo makes some quip about how she'd liked to see Dean do better, and Dean has a joke about a giraffe on an ice-rink and it's pretty funny, too, and for a while, at least, Dean is able to forget the way Cas looks at him.

They walk side by side for many miles, Dean and Cas, and their knuckles bump against each other. Cas' hand shifts on the sling of his rifle as he adjusts its weight; the stretch and flex of metallic metacarpals underneath his skin catches Dean's eye and for several seconds holds him still. Sometimes Dean's skin itches with their proximity, and he responds to this by angrily stomping away or switching the patrol formation so that he's as far from Cas as possible, and yet still he'll find himself watching Cas from that distance – the slope of his shoulders, the soft line of the back of his neck up into his helmet – and wishing he were closer.

Even standing next to him, Dean thinks sometimes he wants to be closer.

  


On the twenty-third day of the expedition, the squad's comms die out.

No-one can be certain exactly when they lose signal, as it's not until the late afternoon that Garth realises they haven't had any contact with Warrant Officer Mills all day – not that she's in constant communication with them, but usually she drops in once or twice to check that everything's alright, where they are, what their situation is, whether they need any replenishments or ammunition drops – and her silence isn't so much alarming as it is vaguely disappointing, seeing as she's their only link back to their normal lives. When Garth pulls out his radio, however, to check whether she's left any messages, they discover that there's been nothing but static for several hours.

"Uh, sarge?" Garth calls cheerily. "Houston, we've got a problem!"

Of the three sergeants who lift their heads, Bela is the one who crosses to see him. "What?" she demands, and for once she isn't even snippy – it's generally accepted within the squad that when sunny, optimistic Garth says that there's a problem, shit is about to hit the fan.

"Comms are gone," he says, and he clicks his transmitter off and on several times to demonstrate. "I dunno when we lost it – I'd say at least five hours ago."

Bela doesn't answer immediately; she lets out a long breath and looks backwards towards Dean and Victor, both of whom are watching carefully from their positions within the patrol. She raises a hand in one sharp gesture, signalling to everyone to stop and set up a temporary defensive position, and once the squad are settled into the dust, Victor and Dean hurry over.

Nothing they try is of any use: the line is down, and they simply have to wait for it to come back up. What it means, though, is that while they wait in this moment of suspended animation, they are completely alone. No-one has any idea where they are, or what they're doing. If they come under attack, there won't be any back-up; if something happens to one of them, an injury or some other crisis, no-one will come to their assistance.

Victor's decision is that the best thing to do is to set up a harbour nearby until contact is re-established, rather than move farther away and risk not being found, and so they head out a couple miles further west until around nineteen-hundred, when they find that the ground dips away into a hollow roughly the size of one of the base ship's conference rooms, above which there is a sharp jut of rock that curves upwards in lumpy undulating waves of stone, washed white in thin stripes where the hollow must once have been a pool. It's dry now, and sheltered from three sides in the way the rock curls in on itself, so that there is only one way in or out. It would never be particularly good for radio signal – the transmitters are always given to the sentries who stand out in the hollow's mouth – but as far as potentially semi-permanent harbours go, it's comfortable, mostly sheltered from the harsh beating of the sun, and easy to defend.

"Not bad digs," Gordon comments as they head in, and he throws off his pack to bounce against the rock wall before he drops down to sit on it and dig through his webbing for rations. "I'll give it three stars."

"Three stars, you stingy son of a bitch," Jo scoffs. She dumps her own pack and stretches theatrically, arms out akimbo as she looks around. "This is the goddamn Ritz."

Cas looks over quizzically at Dean.

"Fancy hotel," he says gruffly, and Cas inclines his head a little to acknowledge it.

Dean heads over to drop his stuff beside Jo's, and one by one, they all get comfortable with a strange kind of permanency – they unfold their hexamine stoves in careless, luxurious untidiness, with the knowledge that they're not going to have to shove everything away at a moment's notice, and they shrug out of their webbing, unzip their jackets, remove their helmets. They cook rations and stretch out until their bones pop; they relax.

Garth sprawls out in one spot where the sun spills over the rock's crest, with the declaration that since the sun is low enough now to be tolerated without burning to a crisp, he's going to work on his tan, and Jo and Cassie set up a mildly amusing game in which they see how much loose soil they can heap on various parts of Garth's body before he realises what they're doing. Sam, Kevin, and Cassie sit together sharing a chocolate bar as they gossip, and Dean is content just to sit back and bask in the easiness of it all. He brews a coffee over his stove, stirs two extra sugars into it, just for the hell of it, and is just about to take it off the heat when he notices that Cas has disappeared.

At first, he pushes it from his mind – why should he even care? – and he sips at his coffee, careful not to burn his tongue. It begins to gnaw at him though, seeing that Cas isn't with Sam, or with the other Androids, or anywhere in the hollow, and it becomes impossible to clear the distraction from his head even as he tries to participate in other conversations; he gives up.

"Hey, did anyone see where Cas went?" Dean asks, his tone painstakingly casual.

Charlie tilts back in her seat to look over her shoulder. "Beats me."

"I saw him leave in the direction of the sentry point," Gabriel announces, and Dean looks at him expectantly, waiting for some further explanation or comment, but receives none; Gabriel stares blankly back without another word.

"Okay," Dean says at last. "Cool. Thanks."

He recognises that to immediately bail out of the current conversation in search of Cas would be weird, and so he forces himself to sit still, surrounded by the idle chatter and friendly arguments of his team-mates, for at least another forty-five seconds before he gets to his feet.

"Be right back, you guys," he says absently, and he heads out towards the hollow's mouth, that narrow space between the two crags of rock that form high, defensive walls on three sides.

Gordon and Inias are on duty there, both staring sullenly into the distance rather than make any attempt at conversation, and Dean waves a hand in a half-wave as he approaches. Before he reaches them, however, he spots what looks like it might be Cas – there, a little way off, is a low juniper tree with heavy, twisted branches that curl over on themselves so that it almost forms a neat circle, and through its tangled leaves and gnarled wood, Dean can glimpse the outline of a body, the charcoal grey of a combat suit, a dark mess of hair.

Now Gordon is looking at him, though, so Dean points towards the juniper tree to indicate where he's going, rather than just heading out aimlessly into the desert, and he picks his way carefully over the uneven dirt, misshapen rocks, and dry fountains of deer grass towards Cas.

"Hey," he calls as he gets close, and he can see Cas clearly now.

Cas sits on one of the juniper's thicker branches where the weight of its own wood has pulled it towards the earth in a slow curve, his feet close together, and he stares off into the sky with an intensity that suggests he's cataloguing it in a hundred different ways all at once. He doesn't answer. The only indication that he's even aware of Dean's presence is that he blinks when Dean speaks, as though startled from some reverie.

Dean stops a couple of feet away from him, and suddenly finds himself achingly self-conscious that he has no idea what he's doing. He isn't sure what to do or say, but he can't leave now – even Cas, with his limited knowledge of societal norms, would understand that there was something odd about someone leaving in silence immediately after having clearly sought him out – and Dean resigns himself to the fact that he should have stayed with the rest of the squad. He sticks his hands deep into the pockets of his combat pants, for want of something to do with them. "Uh," he says, brilliantly. "Hi. What are you doing?"

Cas takes a deep breath, like he's drinking in the air, and then he exhales. The dust motes that hang in the air all around them are disturbed by that breath, swirling in slow, languid coils upwards to where the sunlight catches them all aglitter. "Did you know that the sky has been a different colour every single night we've been here?" he asks.

Dean moves tentatively to sit down next to Cas, who shifts up to make room for him. Dean looks out at the same sky, then, and he has to admit there's a certain rough loveliness to it, the way it bleeds blue into violet and then into a pastel shade like lilacs frosted over in the snow. "It's purple," he says bluntly.

Cas looks over at him, and Dean wonders if what he said was really so stupid as to deserve the scrutiny he's now under – Cas' eyes slightly narrowed in careful study, his brow crinkling in the centre. "Are you alright?" he asks.

Taken aback, Dean glances at him, even when he meant not to, and he's caught off-balance by the way the soft purple light spreading dimly up from the horizon catches Cas' eyes. "Huh – what?"

"You came looking for me," Cas clarifies, and just frowns to indicate that he expects some kind of explanation for this unusual behaviour.

Dean looks away with a laugh so forced it hurts, and incredulously says, "What, so I'm not allowed to – to, I dunno, see you? When I want to, sometimes? Can I not just…" he trails off, waving one hand ambiguously. "Yeah. So what?"

Cas squints at him.

"I'm alright," Dean says, realising too late that this answer would've been easier and saved him a lot of awkwardness, and he sets his jaw stubbornly as he stares off into the distance, where the sun is low and the colours fade to muted shades as warm as candlelight. He can feel Cas' eyes on him still.

For several moments, neither of them speak. Dean looks out at the setting sun, and Cas looks at Dean, and Dean waits for him to move on and find something more interesting to study, but he doesn't. Out of the corner of Dean's eye, almost imperceptibly, he sees the downwards flicker of Cas' eyelashes – not away, just down, like his gaze is running over Dean's face, his neck and shoulders, like water.

It makes Dean's skin itch, and the hot flush that flares up from his collarbones is at odds with the shiver tracing its phantom fingertips down the length of his spine, and out of an annoyance born more out of his own inability to behave rationally than because of anything Cas has done, he snaps, "What?"

"What?" he snaps.

Cas balks. "Did I—?"

"You're staring at me," Dean says, and he turns to scowl at Cas. "What's your deal, man – what do you want from me?"

Cas stares at him. "I don't think I understand. From you? Dean, I don't want anything from you."

"Really?" Dean demands. "Because it sure as shit doesn't feel like that. It feels like – Jesus, I don't know – like, what is this?" The words spill clumsily out of his mouth, and he has no idea where he's going with this, and his throat is pulled up tight to say the things he wants to say. He flails a hand vaguely between them, and then lets that hand fall heavily back into his lap as though all the bones are gone from it. "The way you look sometimes, Cas – the way you look at – at me." He exhales shakily. "What is that? What is it you want?"

Cas' mouth opens slightly, as though an answer is on the tip of his tongue, but just when Dean thinks he can see the shape of it trapped behind Cas' teeth, Cas just breathes a long sigh, and he looks away. "It doesn't matter. What I want is, frankly, impossible," he says sharply, and he tips his chin up skywards like he's waiting for rain. "It's all trapped in the way I was made – or engineered, I don't know. Everything I think and do and… feel—" and here he looks across at Dean again, his eyes wide with the significance of what he's just said, the fact that he can feel, in any capacity, "—Dean, it all gets sent back to base. I don't know if it's just sitting in some computer in Doctor Niehammer's office or if she's checking it regularly, but the fact is that it's only so long until I get caught. And I don't want to get caught. I don't want them to find out how I feel," Cas says, his words all running over each other in desperate tones, like small darting fish in a river that he can't hold back.

Dean swallows hard. Somehow, without ever putting the real question out there, Cas has caught onto the heart of it, and Dean realises now that in all their discussions of Cas' newfound emotions, he neglected the most important question. He hesitates, air pent-up in his chest. "How do you feel?"

Cas breathes roughly, in and out. "I feel… grateful – that I met you," he starts, slow like he's pulling the words from out of someplace deep and dark. "I feel afraid, that maybe one day you won't be here with me anymore – or that I won't be here with you. The latter being more likely, I think. I feel – I don't know. I feel… nauseated, perhaps. I know I lack the internal function to replicate such a feeling, but it's all I can think – I feel sick."

"Wow, thanks," Dean says as he huffs out his breath, and he rolls his eyes, because he doesn't know how else to respond to this. Cas feels – Dean knows that much. Emotions, pain, it's all there in him somewhere, but Dean doesn't want to hear the rest of it, and it's ridiculous because Dean is the one who initiated this conversation, who challenged Cas, pushed and pushed at him until he broke and the truth came out. He thinks that maybe he started this up in the hope that Cas would prove him wrong – say something blunt and mechanical, something devoid of any real feeling, and Dean could sleep easy in the knowledge that all this, and Cas, was meaningless.

"No, I mean… I don't know." Cas looks across at him. "I feel out of control."

Dean's mouth has become very dry. "Cas," he says.

"I feel like everything is falling apart and I don't know how to stop, but—"

"Cas, stop," Dean croaks, because none of this can be real – none of this can be possible – and his pulse is ringing inside his skull and he doesn't know what to do with himself.

"—but when I look at you – when I'm near you," Cas says, and he looks at Dean with a face so open and honest that it hurts, because Cas doesn't know how to be anything except open and honest, and there is no way that a face based on machinery could look so human, "I know that as long as I exist, I never want to be anywhere else."

Dean kisses him.

Cas sits perfectly immobile all while their mouths are pressed together, Dean with his eyes closed tight and he doesn't dare to pull back because his pulse is pounding and his stomach pitches like he could throw up because he's made a horrible mistake and, childishly, he thinks that maybe if he just stays frozen like this, his lips against Cas', then he can postpone the terrible moment of facing Cas' reaction infinitely.

Slowly, Dean pulls back from Cas and lets his eyes crack open, his face scrunched nervously around the nose and mouth so that he's squinting and doesn't have to look at Cas full-on.

Cas' eyes are open, his eyebrows lifted, and his face is soft around the edges. He doesn't say anything. Dean's stomach pitches anxiously again, and he thinks he's definitely going to puke now, and he takes a deep, shaky breath to steady himself – at least then he can maybe get up and walk away before he hurls – and then Cas carefully lifts both hands to cup around Dean's jaw and presses their mouths together again.

Instinctively, Dean leans into it, into the pressure of Cas' hands and the heat of his fingers on his skin. They sit together like that, letting on moment bleed into the next, unmoving but for the slow, careful drag of Dean's mouth over Cas' to capture his bottom lip, to nudge at the seam of his closed mouth until he opens on an exhalation, and then Dean tilts his head forwards to press his forehead tight against Cas', so that they're pressed close but there's an inch or of space between their mouths.

Dean squeezes his eyes shut even tighter, hard enough that there are spots and abstract shapes breaking out in dim beige behind his eyelids. "Cas," he manages, his voice rough, but he can't get any further than that.

Cas' hands are still on Dean's face, but they don't move; Dean doesn't think Cas knows what to do with himself now any more than Dean does.

"Dean, I'm sorry," Cas says quietly. "I shouldn't have—"

"No, it's my fault – I started it," Dean interrupts, and he sits back heavily like he's been pushed, so that Cas' hands drop from Dean's face to hang limp in his own lap. Dean twists away from him and rubs one hand roughly over his face as though trying to scrub himself clean.

For a long moment, neither of them speak. Dean breathes in; breathes out. There is a slow, lazy scuff of loose bird feathers that drift through the dust before tangling into the low, prickly underbrush.

"But I provoked you," Cas says, at last. "I said—"

"I know what you said, Cas," Dean snaps, and his eyes flash over to meet Cas', his expression hard. "Look – do you even know what this is? What we're doing here?"

"Of course I know what this is," Cas says, a little defensively, and he leans back in his seat so that his body is a diagonal line tilted away from Dean. "I'm not human, but I'm not a child either."

Dean can't take it anymore; he jerks to his feet and, with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his combat suit's pants, he takes a few slow, meandering steps away, his feet skimming the dirt in languid circles before he puts each step down as though he isn't sure that the ground will even hold him after what he's done. He breathes deeply, in and out one more time, to steady himself. "What do you want, Cas?"

"I don't know. I want to be more than equipment. I want to… be," Cas' voice comes from behind Dean, low and asphalt-rough as ever, but laced all through with frustration, maybe that he doesn't the words for things in his head. "I want to have."

"And where do I come into that?" Dean asks brusquely, tilting his head halfway towards his shoulder as though to look back at Cas, but not quite making it all the way there.

There is the harsh sound of Cas letting out a sigh. "I don't know how to do all these things," he admits. "I don't know how to exist the same way you do – spontaneously, urgently, with love and humour and carelessness, but—"

Cas stops.

"But what?"

"But," Cas says slowly, "I think, all the same, that the creature I become when I'm with you is the closest I'll ever have to that."

Dean tips his head down, looks at his feet. The red dirt has left bright wounds across his boots where he's scuffed the toe across the ground, and there is a fine mist of dust all across his feet and ankles. It's been a long time since he polished the leather, or even cleaned it; it's a long time since he can remember doing any field admin at all. There's just Cas, stamped over his every memory of the past few weeks – with his rifle pulled into his shoulder, with his face screwed up in the sunlight, with that awkward half-twist of a smile which is so hard-won that to Dean it's like a standing ovation. With his hands still in his pockets, Dean pivots on his heels to turn back and face Cas. "So what, heroin's humanity and I'm your gateway drug, is that it?" he asks, but he's speaking softer now.

Cas is still sitting on that crumbling jut of rock, his feet placed neatly together directly in front of his body, and once Dean's turned around, he finds Dean's eyes again, and he just shrugs. "I don't know. Or the other way around," he says, and he squints up at Dean where he stands directly in the line of the sunlight. He speaks simply now, without flinching from his words. "I want you and whatever comes with that. You know how it works – you tell me what it means."

Dean doesn't have an answer for that. He doesn't know what it means, or how to explain to Cas that he doesn't know, or how to face an everyday reality that is so unsteady and uncertain, but he knows that the quiet, honest humility of Cas' admissions mean more than any fancy military funding for new technology, and he knows that Doctor Niehammer can go fuck herself. So Dean doesn't say anything; he traces his steps back across to Cas, crouches in front of him, and he plants on Cas a kiss as light and fleeting as the last lavender rays of evening over the hilltops.

  


At around three in the morning, Dean is woken by a dull squeaking sound, and the harsh grating of metal on metal. Blinking blearily, he sits up in his sleeping bag and glances around the encampment, but everyone is fast asleep. There is Jo's unruly disarray of hair; there is the cacophony of Garth's snoring against Victor's, like an unconscious argument. Away in the distance is the faint red glow of the sentry's flashlight, shifting impatiently in a manner indicative of human tiredness. Just under the jut of hard red sandstone are the Androids, sitting up stiffly as corpses until the morning when they'll be powered up again. Cas is not among them.

Dean wriggles out of his sleeping bag, grabs his webbing and his rifle, and tiptoes out carefully past the other sleeping bodies, away from their makeshift camp. He moves towards the sentry position, to see if they know what's going on even if they aren't the actual source of the noise. The dim red light of Dean's own flashlight reveals a tall, gangly silhouette with long hair in a sort of dishevelled halo of bedhead.

"Sam," Dean hisses, and the silhouette jumps, startled.

Sam snaps his pistol up to aim, although Dean's not sure exactly what Sam intends to do with it, as a medic. "Dean?" Sam whispers back, and he lowers it. He kneads at his eyes roughly with the knuckles of his free hand. "What are you doing here?"

"Something woke me up," Dean says. "A noise – I came to see if knew anything about it. You heard anything?"

Sam shakes his head. "Nope. Haven't seen anything, either, except for a couple of coyotes giving me the stink-eye over that way somewhere." He jerks his pistol in the direction of the desert beyond his sentry point, and then turns to look out into the gloom. "I don't think there's anything or anyone out here for miles. What did you hear?"

"I dunno. Something metal. Like someone sharpening a knife, maybe?" There's no easy way to describe, or the accompanying bone-deep chill that ran all through him. "It was pretty loud. You sure you didn't hear anything?"

Sam nods. "I'm sure." His eyebrows pull together, though, as worry bleeds through Dean into him. "I mean, we could send a patrol around or something but they won't even know we're here until then, or until they come around this way."

Dean's face scrunches up grimly. "Yeah," he agrees at last. "I guess you're right. Besides, even if they did somehow know that we were, they wouldn't exactly be able to sneak up on us." He laughs. "I mean, come on – nothing short of super-human is getting in or out over that—"

Dean stops.

"What is it?" Sam asks. "Dean?"

He looks up at Sam, his mouth slightly open, and he tries to think about something to say. "I'll be right back," is what he chooses, in the end, and so he hastens away around the high, sharp outer edge of the rock crest, away from Sam frantically whispering for him to come back. He slows from a jog to a careful walk as he gets around the back, where the crest is jagged and high like a sunrise, sweeping down in a near-sheer rock face, until the crumble of loose stone and tangled dry shrubs with pale pointed leaves.

Sitting on a large chunk of uneven, red stone, with his back to Dean, is Cas. With one hand he grips his own knee, his fingers locked and blanching from exertion; in the other hand he holds a bayonet.

When Dean speaks, his voice cracks and comes out hoarse. "Cas, what are you doing?"

Cas doesn't turn or give any indication that Dean's presence means anything to him. He certainly doesn't stop. He just keeps sawing, and that terrible, shrill scream of metal breaking stabs straight through Dean's skull, and so Dean rushes forwards. He grabs Cas' shoulder, roughly yanks him back so that he spins, and he tries to rip the bayonet out of Cas' hand, but he can't because Cas is too strong and the blade already too deeply embedded in the circuitry of Cas' forearm. "What are you doing – stop it, Cas – just – stop—" and he's choking up in the back of his throat now because Jesus Christ – what Cas has done is irreparable.

Cas jerks violently away from Dean and his desperate, clutching hands. "Get off, Dean – let me do this!"

"No," Dean snaps, and if he can't get the bayonet out of Cas' arm, then he grabs at his wrists and holds him still. Cas could fight him off and be free, but he doesn't; he lets Dean hold him. His arm is gruesome. He's hacked messily just above the elbow; a ragged slice through synthesised flesh that looks as though it should be bleeding copiously, except that then it cuts straight away to smooth plastic that flashes a desperate orange as its systems are breached; then, below that, it's all steel brackets and ugly scattered cables as thick as Dean's finger. There is no red-wire-blue-wire urgency to those cables. They just seem heavy and exhausted. "Cas, look at what you've done."

"The tracker chip," Cas says quietly. "I have to—"

"They'll shut you down for this," Dean exclaims, and he shakes the wrist of the damaged arm; it rattles like a broken toy. Dean can't look away from that bloodless wound.

"Not true." Cas exhales heavily as though he's deflating, and he sinks into Dean's touch. "A missing arm can be replaced. A faulty hard-drive, on the other hand – they'll shut me down for that." He looks up to meet Dean's eyes.

"There has to be another way," Dean says, and he's already weighing up how best to repair the arm. "We'll get Gordon to fix you – we'll say you got attacked by a wolf or something – and then we'll—"

"There is no other way," Cas cuts in. "They're going to find me, and they're going to take me back to the labs, and they're going to destroy me."

There's a moment where Dean battles internally with Cas' logic, trying to find some other point to argue, but there's a lump the size of a plum in his throat and he has no more real answer than 'but you can't', and Cas knows it. "Cas—"

"Dean, I'm broken," Cas says, his voice low.

"You're not broken, damnit," Dean bursts out, and he's never done it before but he takes Cas' face in both hands now, leaving Cas' own hands loose in his lap, and he cradles Cas' jaw like it's made of glass. "Come on, man - you're more human than, like, eighty percent of actual humans that I know. You know that, right?"

Cas' skin is exactly room temperature under Dean's hands – a combination of hot sand cooling slowly and cold night air, so that he's faintly chilled but warm underneath – and with one of Dean's thumbs running raggedly over his bottom lip, his mouth tilts up into a rueful smile. "That means I'm broken," he reminds Dean. He lets out a long breath that whispers over Dean's hand, and he lets his eyes flicker slowly over his face. "The way I feel shouldn't be possible."

"Anything's possible with me," Dean laughs, just to be obnoxious, but the sound is brittle in his throat.

Cas doesn't laugh. "They can't shut me down if they can't find me," he tells Dean, and with that he lifts the broken hand, complete with bayonet still embedded deep into the metallic meat of it. "The radios are down, so for several hours – maybe even days – Doctor Niehammer won't even know that I'm missing. I may never get another chance like this, Dean. I have to go."

Dean's hands drop from Cas' face like a stone. "Where?" he demands. "We're in the middle of freakin' nowhere, Cas. There is nowhere to go."

Cas considers this. "As far as I can?" he says, as though he's trying the words out in his mouth, and he looks away into the distance, through the cool darkness, where the abstract shapes of cacti and low shrubs are faintly illuminated by the slow pale twist of stars overhead. "Before I fall apart, at least. Did you know that I don't have the colour of the ocean when it's raining in my database?" His nose scrunches up at the end. "I'd like to rectify that."

Dean stares at him, because there are six hundred miles between them and the ocean in any direction, and Cas might have that fact tucked away in all his wealth of knowledge, but he doesn't know what that means, and there's so much hope in him and it's all wasted and it fucking hurts. "Cas, you'll never make it." His voice comes out strained.

Cas looks across to meet Dean's eyes. "Then help me."

For a moment, Dean can only breathe, and that at a stretch. He doesn't say anything; just stares at Cas, with all his infinite hope for things to be better if they can just get away from the law and the rules, and it's ridiculous – walking hundreds of miles across some of the most desolate landscape west of the radiation line, occupied by enemy, with no real idea of what they would even do when they got there except that Cas wants to see rain on the ocean, and that's all he asks for – Dean, and the ocean, and the two of them together against all odds.

Dean would be fired for it, he knows that much; it would be considered deserting. His squad would suffer without him – the mission might even have to be cut short – and he'd be punished. That's if he ever came back, that is. He might not even survive. He might be shot by Mexicans, or torn apart by coyotes, or he might collapse of heat exhaustion in the middle of the desert. He might not ever see Sam again. Or he might stand on one of the last pure shores in the United States, and find a place where there's no fighting, and where nobody cares what matter your organs are made of as long as you know how to be kind.

Six hundred miles is a long way - and all for an idea, for the colour of the rain on the water. Dean has no idea how they'd get that far - he doesn't know what they would if they even made it there. Turn around and come back? Radio back for Warrant Officer Mills to come and collect them once they've had enough? They could live there, Dean supposes - right in Mexican territory, where everyone on all sides would want them dead. They could lie low. They could live simply - that is, if they get there.

Six hundred miles is a very long way.

Dean exhales slowly, letting out the air like he's releasing a weight.

"We'll go south," he says.

Cas nods. "Okay."

"It'll be quicker to the ocean even if it is through Mexican land, and even if we do run into trouble, they'll be a hell of a lot nicer than the Chinese will," Dean goes on, convincing himself as much as he is convincing Cas.

"That's a wise decision."

"And we'll have to run."

Cas' mouth tilts at the corners, a half-smile so small that Dean wouldn't have seen it at all several weeks ago, but to him now it's the sturdiest thing he knows. Cas says, "I can do that."

Dean reaches out, curls his hand around the side of Cas' neck so that his fingers push into the hair at the nape of his neck, and his thumb bumps against the hinge of Cas' jaw, and he almost laughs again because this is the stupidest fucking thing he's ever done, and he's done a lot of stupid things. "We're going to have torun."

Cas' smile pulls a little wider still. "Okay."

There is a sharp crunch behind them, something trodden underfoot, and then: "Are you going somewhere?"

Dean jerks instantly to his feet, his hand falling away from Cas. "Sam."

Sam walks across to them, his eyes down at his feet as he treads carefully through the bracken, and then at last he reaches them, and he lifts his head. "Charlie's just come on sentry, so I figured I'd come round and see if you'd been eaten or something." He looks at Cas. "I guess you found the source of the noise, then."

Dean opens his mouth to respond but Cas cuts across him before he can speaks. "Sam, I'm leaving."

Sam looks saddened to hear the words out loud, but unsurprised. His eyes flick down from Cas' face to the gaping mess of his forearm. "I figured. Is there anything I can say to stop you?"

"Dean's already tried everything," Cas says with a rueful smile. "Sam… I have no reason to stay – no home, no family—"

"Let us be your family," Sam cuts in, and he catches hold of Cas' sleeve with a thickness to his voice that Dean hasn't heard there in a long time. "Dean, and me, and Charlie – we—"

"I'm going with him," Dean says quietly.

This is the first thing that catches Sam off-guard. He flinches a little, like he's been struck, and looks between the two of them with his brow crumpled into a frown that is hurt beyond words. He swallows, and for a second says nothing; he composes his face and gives one curt nod that ends with his chin tilted high. "Let me come too."

"No," Dean says immediately, but he can't help but give a short laugh at that – his dorky little brother desperate to follow him to the ends of the earth: some things never change. He shakes his head. "I'm sorry, but no."

"Come on," Sam insists, and his voice is taking on that whiny quality that Dean remembers from whenever he would shove Sam off an arcade game so that he could play instead, back when they were kids. Sam lets go of Cas' sleeve and takes instead to frowning at Dean so hard that he could pull a muscle in his face. "I'm a medic, you'll be safer with me anyway – and we can carry more supplies, and we can look after each other better—"

"No, Sam," Dean says again, more firmly this time, and he raises his eyebrows at him in that I-mean-it-or-else way which always used to settle Sam down into sulky obedience. "Me leaving is gonna fuck the squad up enough without me stealing away the only medic. You're a doctor – for people, not machines. You need to stay with humans."

Sam arches his eyebrows with his usual bitchy sarcasm. "Oh, so you're not human now?"

Dean hesitates for a second as he realises what he's said, but then he gives a non-committal shrug. "I don't know," he says, and he looks over at Cas beside him, "but whatever he is, I'm the same."

Cas takes his hand.

Sam lets out a long, heavy sigh. "Okay," he says. "Okay. Fine."

Then, much to Dean's surprise, he gets immediately into action: he tugs his rifle sling over his head and pushes the weapon into Dean's hands, and he shrugs out of his webbing to dump it on the ground at Cas' feet.

"Take my supplies with you – Cas, you might not need food and water but Dean will. Water, especially. Ammunition, too, in case – I don't know. Just in case." He tugs his medical pack out of the back pouch of his webbing, unfolds it with gestures made short and almost mechanical by practice – and he pulls out a thin coil of razor-sharp wire saved for amputations. He glances up at Cas. "You don't feel pain, right?"

"No."

"Good. Hold still."

Sam wraps the wire twice around Cas' forearm, just above his own mutilated attempt to hack his arm off. In spite of Cas' admission to not feeling pain, it doesn't keep his free, good hand from clutching tighter to Dean's as they watch Sam work.

Sam clenches his teeth, flexes his fingers on the plastic handles at the end of the wire, and then he pulls. Cutting through metal and plastic is more difficult than through flesh, but it makes quick work of Cas' arm anyway – a good deal cleaner than Cas' own ministrations – and Sam sits back with a grunt. He takes a roll of bandaging from his pack, then, and wraps it neatly several times around the stump end of Cas' synthesised bicep until the metal edges and ragged loose cable no longer shows, and he could be mistaken for a human amputee.

Dean watches the whole thing with a slight grimace – for all intents and purposes, it still looks like a real arm being cut off – and afterwards, he asks, "How does it feel?"

"It doesn't," Cas says, still looking down at his stump as Sam bandages it.

Dean rolls his eyes. "Physically, I mean."

"Lighter." Cas sits up straighter once Sam has finished, and he shifts his weight in his seat. He loosens his grip on Dean's hand, which was beginning to lose colour. "A little lopsided, maybe."

Dean grins at him. "We can deal with a little lopsided."

Sam folds his medical kit away, and stands up, dusting his hands on the pants of his combat suit. "And you're going to have to hit me," he says, last of all, and he pats the cheek nearest to Dean. "Hard."

"Sam—" Dean starts.

"At least do me this favour so I don't get in trouble. Come on," Sam urges, with no way of knowing that Dean wasn't trying to protest against beating up his brother – God only knows he's done that enough times – but rather trying to find some way to thank him. Sam's taking an enormous risk by being involved in their escape, even if he doesn't come with them, but Dean knows his little brother, and he knows when he's trying to say that he loves somebody even if he can't get the words out, and Dean's grateful for it. Sam leans forwards further, getting into Dean's face now. "Come on, Dean! You don't have a lot of time."

Dean takes a step forwards instead and puts his arms around Sam to hug him hard, his face smashed into Sam's stupid wide shoulders, wide as a grown man now. "I'll come back," he says, and that's it.

Sam slaps him hard on the back. "I hope you find what you're looking for. And I hope it's good enough for you." He pushes Dean away to hold him at arms' length for a second, and then claps him on the arm, like he's letting Dean know that he's still there, even when he soon won't be. "Right. Are we gonna do this?"

Dean looks away to Cas, who has shouldered Sam's webbing and looks a little uncomfortable at the height and breadth of it, who catches Dean's gaze with a look of stern practicality as he adjusts the straps. Cas nods. This is the right thing to do, Dean knows. He looks back to Sam. "Let's do it."

And with that, with one hand still on Sam's shoulder like an anchor, Dean punches him as hard as he can in the mouth.

Sam lets out a short gasp, reeling backwards hard, but the time he straightens up, Dean's hand is gone, and he and Cas are off through the dark and under the stars.


	5. Chapter 5

They run and they don't look back. Under the stars and over the high sandstone ridge that takes them up past the high craggy bluffs of the Fisher Towers and then sweeps down back into that crumbling plateau, they run, their feet kicking up dust that swirls loose and choking about their ankles, footsteps a pounding tattoo against dry earth with their breath coming fast. Dean trips sometimes; Cas grabs a handful of his combat suit, hauls him forwards so that he doesn't fall, and together they stumble drunkenly, clinging to each other with giddy laughter – because they've done it, they're running – and they go for several more miles with their hands curled together, sweaty fingers tangled together or fisted into clothes.

They stagger recklessly down the sides of steep gorges, the carved-out swirls of stone where the water has cut a path straight down and the rocks curve varnish-smooth above them. They clamber over the smoky, scraping stacks that stand up sentinel to a night that is clear and crisp. There are paths, sometimes, and there are roads less frequently still, but their way is lit, if dimly, by the silver wash of the moon and the faint glitter of a purplish starlight, and they have far to go.

Slowly, the sky stretches to dim hollowness, like paint washed thin with water so that the colour seeps and splits and the rough white scratch of the canvas is visible underneath, like the darkness is spreading its fingers to reach until its knuckles crack, and in the spaces in between there is daylight, faintly pink up from the jagged line of the horizon where the bluffs jut upwards like old teeth, with the sleepy curve of the white-topped mountains beyond it.

When the first sliver of the sun lifts its sleepy head from that uneven horizon, Cas stops running.

Still being set into motion, it takes Dean a good few seconds to stop, slowing down into a clumsy, staggering jog as his muscles settle into stagnancy, and for a second he has to double over, rest his hands on his thighs and just try to breathe while the last four hours catch up with him. When he feels like he can breathe fairly regularly without fear of throwing up, he turns back to see Cas standing motionless some ten or fifteen feet back of him.

Cas' chin is tipped upwards, his mouth slightly open like he wants to breathe in all that early morning light, and his eyes track slowly across the landscape like he's seeing everything for the first time. The slow woody sweep of the desert up into shrub land and mountain-tops, the sky all pastels above the speckled white and green of the peaks: it's spectacular enough to a human with any small grasp on the infinite impossibilities of what the Earth can do and be, and to Cas it must be world-changing. In the back of his head, Dean is dimly aware that the real wonder is behind him – all that land and sky – but he can't look away from Cas, with his eyes wide and his arms hanging loose at his sides like he doesn't know what to do with them anymore.

Then, as Dean watches, Cas' eyes fall from the sky and the gnarled old knuckles of the mountaintops, and fall instead on Dean, and Cas' face scrunches up around the mouth and nose like he's conscious of himself now, having been caught, but the smile he gives is soft and small.

Dean walks towards him, baby steps with his back to the sunrise, and he knows that he's got some big stupid grin spreading slowly over his face like the first creeping rays of yellow light that find them over the hills and ridges, but he can't quit smiling. When he stops in front of Cas, he just says, "What's new, Scooby Doo?"

Cas drops his head to look down at the ground, his chin tucked into his chest, and for a moment he just exhales, a long and steady breath. "Everything," he says, and he looks up again with an expression as clear and calm as the air was still. "This sky – these colours. I wish that I could breathe your air."

Dean lifts his shoulders in a careless shrug. "Then breathe it."

"I don't have lungs, Dean."

"You've got some kind of fan, though, right?" Dean takes another few steps to close the last of the distance between them, and he plants a hand square on each of Cas' shoulder, holding him steadily at arm's length. He raises his eyebrows in a stern look. "Breathe in," he tells Cas, and he holds Cas' eyes without blinking as Cas inhales slowly, his chest lifting infinitesimally underneath his combat suit. "Now hold it."

Cas nods emphatically, his gestures exaggerated since he can't talk, and he keeps his eyes trained on Dean. Dean can feel the dim pulsing vibrations of the machinery under his skin.

As Cas watches, Dean breathes in, tipping his chin up as he does, and then, carefully, he exhales. "Now you," he says on that outwards whisper of breath, and Cas lets out his pent-up breath. "Could you taste that?" Dean asks.

Cas shakes his head.

"Me neither." Dean claps one of his hands harder onto Cas' shoulder, and his grin is something idiotic and broader than ever, that filters across to widen Cas' own smile. "Don't think too much," he tells him, and as his hand slides up to cup around the side of Cas' neck, he leans forward and bumps their foreheads lightly together like he's making fun of him or trying to get him to start a fight. "You're already breathing it."

  


They give themselves short-term goals to keep themselves going, day-by-day – we're gonna reach that bluff by ten o'clock; we're gonna get past that tree within an hour; we're gonna make it to the foot of those mountains by Tuesday – so that every small landmark feels like a game, and every mile gained feels like a victory, and those mountains, which have stood aloof and intangible at the horizon's puckered brim for the past two days, rise above them now. Dean knows that they can't have gone more than sixty miles, and that there is still always the possibility that they're being pursued, but as the hard yellow dirt of the desert slopes up into cooler air and high pine ridges, he can't help feeling like they've made it. There are birds here, small and darting with songs full of whistling, rather than the occasional menacing swoop of a bird of prey overhead in search of dead things; there are small creeks bubbling over round stones, and in the ponds that settle in all the flat spaces, there are fishes.

They break in the shade when the sun is highest, and Dean digs through his pack for a map. The one that he has is nowhere near as detailed or up-to-date as the one that Kevin was working on, but it includes major geographical points and any changes in terrain, so it's good enough for them.

"That's Horse Mountain," Dean says, pointing it out to Cas on the map. "See? And that over there must be the big one, Abajo Mountain or whatever. Dude, look at how far we've come."

Cas peers at the maps; he stretches out his hand to trace the gradient lines with his fingertips. "There's a pass between these two mountains. We should be able to cut through," he says, and he looks up at Dean with wide eyes. "That could cut days off the journey."

Dean grins at him.

In the coming days, they work doubly hard; they don't even know if they're being chased, but if they are, their pursuers can follow them across open flatland a great deal faster than Dean and Cas can escape up mountainsides. They're walking along the edge of a high ride that sweeps down into lofty evergreens with the thick crunch of winter about their needles scattered underfoot, even in July; here, in the shadow of the plateau, the air is cool and the streams run glittering with small silver fish. Down here, Dean feels like he's waiting for snow even when the day is hot enough for a steady trickle of sweat down between his shoulder blades. They walk one after the other, treading carefully on loose dirt and small skittering stones that tumble over the edge of the ridge and down into spiky tangles of shrubbery.

Cas is at the front, and walking slowly; Dean has blisters on his blisters, on both feet, and a cramp in his calf, so he's going slow as well, but he's human. Dean gets the feeling that Cas is starting to tire.

"You okay up there, buddy?" Dean calls, a little out of breath as they climb higher and higher up the ridge without any clue to there ever being a downhill in sight.

Cas hesitates – only for a second, but enough that Dean notices. "I'm alright," he calls back.

They march on a little further, trudging through the wavering yellow light that spills through the pines. Ahead of him, Dean can hear Cas continually hitching a sharp breath in, holding it a beat, and then letting it out again, like he's trying to say something and hasn't built up to it yet.

Dean tries again. "Cas—?"

"My hand isn't working," Cas interrupts, and he stops in the middle of the track, so abruptly that Dean almost crashes into the back of him.

"What?" Dean demands. He doesn't know what he was expecting, but it wasn't that. He picks his way carefully up the ridge until he's level with Cas, who has still not turned to face him. "What do you mean, it's not working?"

Cas looks at Dean for only a split-second before he lets his eyes flit away again, down towards the ground. He doesn't answer, just lifts his remaining hand for Dean to inspect. Nothing appears to be physically wrong with it, except that it's rigid and unmoving, the fingers locked straight regardless of Cas' best efforts to get them to do anything else.

For a few moments Dean just stares at the hand, squinting a little, tilting his head to one side and then the other, as though in that way he might decipher some hidden cause of the breakdown. He doesn't. He hums and ah's as well, for good measure, but still has no answers. "Uh," he says, and he clears his throat. "So… what's up with that?"

Cas jerks his shoulders in a non-committal sort of shrug. "Perhaps there's some connection that's been loosened over time, something that's finally fallen out altogether," he offers. "Or maybe there's dirt in the electrical system, somehow. The problem's in the wrist – I can tell that much."

"In the wrist?" Dean chuckles to himself. "Well, you know what they say about too much of a good thing…"

Cas stares at him. "What do they say?"

"Well. You know. Like… never mind." Dean shakes his head. "Forget it. It was a wank joke."

"Oh."

Dean studies the hand again, and he pulls a face. "Come on – I'll take a look at it."

He shrugs off his pack and his webbing and digs around inside the back pouches for his portable toolkit – the proper equipment for regular Android maintenance was divided between all members of the squad, but what little Dean has now will have to do. Cas sits on Dean's pack, knees neatly together, and holds out his arm for Dean to work on as he crouches in front of him.

Recalling his training on the base ship in the weeks before deployment, he tries to follow the steps as exactly as possible – one, find synthesised skin seam in the creases, i.e. inside of wrists, elbows, knees, groins, jaw; two, peel skin back to allow access to the plastic mechanism housing, and sensors on the surface should indicate where any electronic problems are originating from – except it's difficult, because even as fidgety as the test dummies that he practiced on were, Cas is a hundred times worse.

"Sit still, will you?" Dean tells him after the third time he gets jolted out of the way by Cas' shenanigans, and he jabs him in the side with a screwdriver.

"My apologies." Cas stops wriggling about where he's sat on Dean's pack, but only for a moment, and then almost as soon as Dean gets to finding Cas' seams again, he starts to shift in his seat again.

Dean slams down the screwdriver onto his own knee and fixes Cas with an impatient, challenging look. "What is it now?"

"Nothing. Just – uncomfortable." Cas shakes his head. "It's fine. Proceed."

Dean raises his eyebrows at Cas for a second, as though daring him to fidget, but Cas just gazes back at him with solemn innocence to indicate how perfectly well-behaved he's being, so Dean goes ahead. It's more than a little weird, peeling back your friend's flesh to get at his insides, but then again, Dean figures he has also helped that same friend amputate his own arm and then run away from the government computers which monitor his every move, so he guesses he'll just call it a pretty weird week and leave it at that.

Underneath, Cas is all shiny plastic occasionally broken up into tiny goose-bumps and metal brackets, with dim lights in primary colours flashing under what looks like a thin layer of Plexiglas. There is no light here that Dean can see to indicate the fault, so he runs the tips of his fingers carefully over the uneven surface of all plastic and metal, tracing lightly around Cas' wrist in a slow circle to search for anything unusual, and this time, Cas doesn't fidget, but he shivers.

Dean stills his hands, and he glances up to see if Cas is okay.

"I'm sorry—" Cas starts.

"No, you okay?" Dean asks, lowering his voice to make sure that Cas knows he's not really mad at him for fidgeting; that Cas could fidget from here until kingdom come and it wouldn't keep Dean from looking after him. He looks down at where his hands are, his fingers pressed against the Plexiglas above where a pale green blinks unobtrusively, and worries whether he might be crossing some boundary or if this might be painful for Cas, somehow.

Cas nods. "My apologies – it's just—"

"Uncomfortable?"

Cas hesitates. "Not… exactly."

Dean's eyes lift to meet Cas'. Neither of them say a word, and then, after what seems like a hundred years with a lump in Dean's throat so that he couldn't break the silence if he wanted to, Cas swallows with a dry click. There is the smooth bob and pull of it in his throat, his Adam's apple, clearly visible with Dean crouching below him and looking up.

Cas looks quickly away, then, like he's said too much.

Dean tilts up onto his toes, tips forwards onto his knees, stretches up, and he presses his closed mouth against Cas'. He only holds it for a second, and then he tilts his head away so that there's breathing space between theirs mouths, and he hesitates. "You can feel that?" he asks.

Cas doesn't answer; he just nods.

Slowly, Dean lifts his hand from Cas' arm, and then reaches out one fingertip to trail down over Cas' forearm, light as raindrops, stopping at the joint of his wrist – and he watches Cas carefully all the while, as his eyes follow the movements of Dean's hand. Dean's hand moves, fingers going to trace the ridges of the mechanised metacarpals rising prominently on the top of Cas' hand when he shifts and flexes. Dean sweeps along the sharp bone at the base of Cas' thumb, bumps into the hollow where thumb joins back into wrist, and he tucks his fingers underneath Cas' wrist and turns his hand over.

Cas watches Dean closely. He's holding his breath.

Still holding Cas' eyes, Dean ducks down, lifts Cas' hand to meet him halfway, and touches a fleeting, light kiss to the inside of his wrist. Cas' breath hitches, and he blinks rapidly as he swallows down whatever just rose inside him. He doesn't look at Dean anymore, not for longer than a second; his eyes flit nervously all over, from Dean to his hand and to the ground and to his feet tucked neatly in front of him and back again, via Dean's eyes once more, and he exhales shakily.

"What's happening?" Dean asks gently.

Cas stares down at his hand now, determinedly never lifting his gaze higher than his thumb. "I have all those sensors, under my skin," he says, his voice quiet and awkward in its usual matter-of-fact statements. "To enable me to respond appropriately to touch and temperature and climate, as a human would – but I—" he hesitates; his eyes flicker up anxiously to meet Dean's. "I like being touched by you."

Dean's mouth breaks involuntarily into a smile; Cas echoes it faintly, with those lighter creases at the edge of his eyes, that softness to the corners of his mouth.

"Well, that's convenient," Dean says, and even though it's not all that sexual, something about the intimacy of it has heat rising up his neck to settle red at his jaw and ears as he says, "because it so happens that I'm a pretty big fan of touching you, so." He breathes in deeply, painfully aware of the colour in his face, and he grins to try and dispel the embarrassment. "So there."

"So there," Cas repeats, and it's such a pointless non-sequitur that Dean isn't even sure that Cas understands what it means, or what function it serves in conversation, but the sound of it in his mouth is fresh and sweet, and so Dean tilts up on his knees to kiss him again. He leaves one hand still rubbing faint, soothing circles over the base of Cas' thumb, and tucks the other up underneath the hinge of his jaw, fingers sweeping carefully over the hair at the nape of his neck and the soft skin beneath his ear.

It sounds like a story – the man kisses the robot, and the robot feels it, and all around them the air is crisp and yellow through the pine trees' feathered eyelashes, and below them the river is running.

  


Once they're clear of the shadow of the mountains, it's another day and a half's walk out over the mesas, with the sun beating hot at their backs, until they catch the near-mythical sight of a paved road snaking away through the red dust. From the vantage point of the mesa's roughly-hewn rooftops, they know that it's only another couple of miles along this road until another, more direct road branches off south for them to follow. They're so caught up in the excitement of having found an easy route for once - unimpeded by towering rock formations or red-stone gaping crevices to which pennies would find no bottom - that they run.

They slip and stagger breathless down the last steep slopes from the mesa, kicking up a small landslide of loose dirt and the clumps of dry grass that stick of in bristly tufts from the rock walls, and they stumble giddy out into the open yellow space at the bottom. There is nothing but that road and the rock face behind them as far as the eye can see, and they stagger upon it as though it were paved with gold.

For a while, Dean walks carefully on the edge of the road, out of habit, until he realises that any vehicle coming along would be a goddamned miracle.

As one road bleeds into another, they wander vaguely through the stifling heat and thick yellow light. They ditch their helmets – they're heavy and annoying and just seem to amplify the heat tenfold upon their heads – and Dean rations his water carefully and they run hard during the cooler hours of dawn and twilight, so that the hours in between they can take more slowly. They don't travel at night anymore, not after the first night when it was all they had. Now they're so far from help, or from any civilisation at all, they have to be more cautious, and in the dark there are too many risks, between getting mauled by coyotes or just straight-up falling into a hole and breaking all their limbs. Dean misses the coniferous luxury of the mountains, even if it was only brief, and he wishes that they hadn't been so hasty to take the shortcut through the Horse Mountain pass. At least they're that much closer to where they're headed, but at the moment it's hard to believe that where they're headed still exists.

"What are you gonna do when we get there, anyway?" Dean asks, out of the blue, as they walk. "Like, the very first thing."

A couple of paces ahead, Cas walks steadily. He doesn't have blisters or aching muscles like Dean does, or a slightly sprained ankle from that time he put his foot into an abandoned jackrabbit warren without realising. Cas just goes – unflinching, unfaltering, with single-minded purpose.

"Well?" Dean prompts, and he stretches his strides out a little longer to catch up with him. "Cas?"

Cas gives a start, looking around at Dean sharply like he hadn't registered he was there. "Dean," he says, and his shoulders relax where they'd pulled up tight. He blinks slowly, the crease in his brow evening out as he turns away from the glare of the sun, and his expression softens altogether. "What is it?"

Dean frowns at him, and comes to a halt beside him. "I asked what you were gonna do when we got there. To the ocean, I mean," Dean says. He looks over Cas' face, taking in the genuine question that is set in the tilt of his mouth, and the slight scrunch at the tip of his nose. "Didn't you hear me, or—?"

"Sorry. I mustn't have been paying attention." Cas squints contemplatively into the middle distance. "I'd sit on the shore, I think, and just look at the water," he says at last, decisively, and he gives a short nod, pleased with the conclusion he's come to.

Dean nudges him in the side with his elbow. "Then?"

Cas shrugs. "I don't know," he admits. "I haven't planned that far ahead. Isn't that amazing?" He looks across at Dean, and his face is warm and open with genuine delight. "We could go swimming," he says. "I might kiss you." The light is caught golden at the ends of his eyelashes, and he smiles. "What about you?"

Dean slings an arm loosely around Cas' shoulders and pulls him clumsily in against his chest. "Well, I'm probably gonna dunk you," he tells Cas simply. "If you're really lucky, I might even throw a dead jellyfish at you, but the dunking is definitely gonna happen. And I'm gonna build the biggest freaking sand-castle the world's ever seen. You wait and see, dude, I'm gonna build you a goddamned palace."

Cas is looking at him with that gummy, shit-eating grin, distractedly broad on his face like he's too caught up in following Dean's every word to even notice that he's smiling. "I'd like that."

It happens like that, and so the first few times time that Cas mishears something Dean has said, or simply doesn't hear him at all, Dean discounts it as being because of the wind, or the fact that he was mumbling again, or that Cas wasn't paying attention.

It goes on for most of a day and a half's walking – all the way along the Highway 276 until they turn off southwest through the open desert again – before Dean considers that Cas' hearing might be faulty.

He tests this theory by waiting until the air is still and quiet, without a trace of wind to buffet his voice the wrong way, with no sound but the steady, relentless crunch of their feet on the dry dirt, and then Dean calls Cas' name, to no response. There isn't even the faintest flicker of recognition across Cas' face; he just keeps going.

Dean stops walking.

"Cas," he calls again, as Cas gets further and further away. "Cas!"

Some ten yards or so ahead of Dean, Cas glances sideways and notices that Dean is no longer beside him. He slows, and then stops, and looks around behind him. When he finds Dean, his brow crumples with relief, and there is the dim flash of a smile at the corners of his mouth. "Dean—"

"You can't hear me, can you?"

That smile fades, and Cas' face falls. He doesn't answer; he just stares back at Dean, across the distance, with his lips pressed tight together like a guilty child holding in a secret.

Dean's face scrunches up with frustration as he finally understands what's happening, and he looks away at the ground. "How long you been lip-reading?" he asks, lifting his head up to look Cas in the face again – because he realises now that that's what Cas needs, in order to have any idea what he's saying.

"A couple days," Cas says, quietly, but his voice carries well enough. A faint breeze picks up, swirling dustily down from the high rust-red stacks at the edge of their vision, and it pushes back Cas' hair, beats a thorny switch of curled branches against his ankle. He shifts his weight, and his rifle clanks idly at his side.

"I mean, can you actually hear anything, or—?"

"It comes and goes." Cas' eyes lower to the ground in front of his feet, and Dean walks towards him again. "Sometimes it's fine," Cas says, and he gives a small shrug, "and other times…"

"Right," Dean says, coming to a halt in front of him. "Okay." He reaches out a hand towards Cas – a hand that floats mid-air before it finds him, hesitating – and then he rests it comfortably on the slope of Cas' shoulder up to his neck. "That's fine. We can work with that."

When they stop for the night, Dean sits him down and uses the last ragged stripes of violet evening across the horizon to light his working hands as he fiddles underneath Cas' skin to try and adjust his hearing, except it's not something easily adjusted; the problem is something more complex than a loose wire somewhere, and although Dean moves some wires, re-routes some electrical signals, Cas' hearing doesn't improve. Eventually, when the sky has gone to blackness and Dean is just fumbling in the dark and bitching about how moonlight doesn't illuminate shit, Cas pulls away from him and lays his hand on top of Dean's screwdriver to still him.

"You can try again in the morning," Cas suggests, but Dean doesn't, and Cas doesn't remind him; they both know that Dean can't do it, and so they leave the problem and hope that it doesn't get any worse. For now, they just accept the fact that sometimes Cas can hear and sometimes he can't, and they continue south.

  


Dean's never been all that excited about geographic landmarks – he was always the kid who was more interested in playing video games than looking out of the window on long journeys – but the day he and Cas reach the wide, meandering snake of the San Juan river, he can't help the little yell that breaks out of him. "Holy shit, Cas, look!" he exclaims, grabbing delightedly at Cas' arm, just in case Cas somehow didn't notice the enormous river cutting across their entire field of vision, and he takes off running.

He doesn't run fast, by any means, with the weight of his pack bouncing on his shoulders and the exhaustion of eight days' constant walking, but he jogs as fast as his cramped, tired legs can carry him towards the mouth of the canyon, in which, some fifty feet below, the San Juan churns languidly and twists on westwards. The water almost looks still, motionless, except for where it strikes the rocks below with a great white spray, and even though Dean knows it would be ridiculous to try and climb down to the water, he can't help staring wistfully at its cool depths, coloured a picturesque blue by the reflection of the open, cloudless sky on that clean water tracking down from the mountains.

Even from up here, he can hear the shush of the water, a low murmur that resonates against the walls of brick-red rock and white bath-ring stripes of erosion, and he gets taken by an idea; he cups both hands around his mouth and yells, "Hey!" as loud as he can, and he beams as he hears his own voice struck back at him by the rocks, quieter now with some of the sound swallowed by the river.

Cas comes up beside him, having continued at a slower pace to catch up, and frowns. "What are you doing?"

Dean drops his hands from his face and looks across at Cas with a broad grin all full of childish excitement. "I'm making echoes."

Cas peers down at the river below them, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he studies the canyon. "This land shape isn't the most conducive towards creating echoes," he says, after a moment's careful inspection. "Better would be some kind of cavern or enclosed space—"

Dean rolls his eyes. "Dude," he interrupts, because he knows that Cas' hearing is okay today, so he's clearly just being a little asshole for the sake of it. "Quit busting my balls here. I'm making echoes, and it works well enough for me." To demonstrate, he turns back to face the river again, stoops low with his hands curled into a funnel around his mouth, and yells again. "Hey! Hello!" Without lowering his hands or his voice, Dean twists at the waist to look up at Cas, still standing awkwardly beside him and looking down at the water, and he yells, "You try!"

Cas' face screws up reluctantly. "That's alright, I'd rather just—"

"Come on!" Dean cuts across him, and raises his voice even louder. "Shout something!"

Cas flinches at the volume, irritation in the line of his mouth, and he huffs sulkily, clearly of the impression that Dean is being very difficult, and he stares down into the canyon with an unimpressed expression on his face, as though he's already made up his mind that if he's going to do this, then he's definitely not going to enjoy it. "I don't know what to say," he says flatly.

"I'm sorry?" Dean yells, right in his face. "I can't hear you, you're gonna have to speak up a little!"

"I said I don't—"

"Sorry, Cas, but I just can't hear a word you're sayi—"

"I don't know what to say," Cas screams, loud enough that his voice cracks, and the sound of his voice echoes back to him, again and again, growing softer until it fades into the rush of the water. In spite of himself, Cas cracks a small smile, and Dean starts laughing at him, giddy until he rocks back on his heels, because this is Cas – stern, unfeeling, humourless Cas, an Android whose favourite hobby Dean used to think was deliberately picking all the fun out of everything – and he's hollering himself hoarse at the edge of the San Juan canyon because Dean asked him to, and it's fucking ridiculous.

Cas lifts his voice louder, yelling, "What's so funny?"

Dean shakes his head. "Nothing," he says, because the things spinning in dizzy circles inside his head right now aren't the kind of things he knows how to say out loud – like how he's blistered and bruised and exhausted and his head is beating with the beginnings of his daily onslaught of heat fatigue, and he still thinks that he'd pick being here with Cas over anywhere else; like how he's never been so love with anyone as he is in love with this moment at the edge of the world, and how he wouldn't even know the start of what loving someone that much would even feel like, except he figures it doesn't get much better than Cas—

"I didn't catch that," Cas shouts at him, then, and his mouth is at last giving way to that stupid grin, all gums and crinkled eyes. "You'll have to—"

"Nothing!" Dean yells back at him, and, to defend his abrupt sentimental lapse, he adds, "You're just stupid-looking, is all," even though he's pretty sure that if there ever were a time to say something monumental, somewhere like this sure would be a nice place to go about it.

  


It's another three days walk westwards along the San Juan's edge until they meet the Colorado River snaking south, and then the two twist together into long, smooth curves back and forth like loose thread unravelling from a fallen spool. According to the gradient lines on Dean's map, the river should eventually condense into an uneven splodge of a lake covering several miles, and the Colorado river should then trail away south again after that point. Dean doesn't know where they'll be headed afterwards; by that point, the border of Arizona slices away the edge of his map and everything beyond the state-line is unclear.

Dean hopes that at least there'll be some way down to the lake's edge from where they are, though, as they're dangerously low on water now. Truth be told, they're dangerously low on everything now, but in this heat and with so much walking, water is the main priority. They can ration the last few food packets to make them last longer; Dean can grit his teeth and bear the blisters rubbing raw without any first-aid to administer. They can make it.

They walk mostly in silence now; it's been a good fifty miles since the grand echo experience at the first sight of the San Juan, and their energy is drained. Even Cas, who has no sensation of pain or physical exhaustion, seems to be tired now.

For more than an hour, they trace the lake's perimeter – both in search of a way down, and also because it is still a part of their route, albeit now a jagged and unruly route as the lake's edges push the canyon out in lazy undulations – looking out as they walk at the diamond glint of the water's surface below them, until a battered wood sign points towards an old worn path down from the canyon's edge to a small arc of stony beach, the rocks rubbed smooth by years of careful footsteps. Cas and Dean pick their way down, carefully – it would be ridiculous to get this far only for everything to be ruined by carelessness when one of them slips and breaks their back – and as Dean nears the bottom, where the path evens out into a gentle slope, and then into the flat rubble of the broken rocks that make up the beach, he slows down to take it all in.

The walls of the canyon tower so high above them that Dean has to crane his head right back for a glimpse of the sky – just a waxy blue strip which now seems so far away and indistinct, when for the last eleven days it's been everything, a vast empty expanse that perpetually weighed hot and heavy on their shoulders to remind them, with the searing heat of the sun, that they were insignificant. There is shade here, although only small, in the shadow of the canyon wall jutting out irregularly or in a crevice, and it's quiet.

Dean hadn't realised until now just how much noise there was in the open: the whistle of the wind, the constant chirruping of insects and the songs of birds in chase of them; plants rustling, grass crunching underfoot; their own voices. Here, everything is still.

In the back of his mind, Dean knows dimly that they need to refill their canteens, but for now that can wait. Dean treads another few steps closer to the water's edge, shrugs off his pack and webbing and rifle and combat jacket, and slowly lowers himself to sit on the rocks with his knees tucked up in front of him. Cas joins him, sitting cross-legged, and for several minutes they just sit.

If it weren't for the fact that there's no food or shelter here, Dean would have said that he could easily stay here forever. Fuck the ocean. That's another three hundred miles away, and as concrete to Dean now as all of Sam's old stories about the Sandman. This lake, here, this shore – that's real. Real, and peaceful, and secluded, like no-one could ever get them here. Dean wants to teach Cas how to skip stones. He wants to roll up the legs of his pants and wade in as far as he can to look for fish, and little crabs, and bugs that make a noise like a cheap penny-store whistle when they bounce against the water, and he wants to show these things to Cas. He doesn't know how to put any of this into words, though, so he just looks across at Cas, his face lit up warm with an easy smile, and says, "What do you think, then?"

Cas is looking out at it all with an expression that seems soft and brittle in equal measure; his eyes are wide, eyebrows tilting up in the middle with awe, but there is a set to his mouth as though he expects that at any moment it'll all fall apart or be taken from him. He inhales deeply through his nose and lets it out slow through his teeth, taking so much time that Dean thinks for a second that maybe Cas' hearing has gone wrong again, but then he speaks. "Jeg tror jeg forstår nå, med steder som dette, hvorfor mennesker er så investert i troen på en høyere mak."

Dean sits perfectly still, doesn't say a word, but slowly the easy grin fades from his mouth. He looks away, out to the water. His most powerful instinct is turn back to Cas and stare at him, like maybe if he just challenges him to fuck up again, then Cas wouldn't dare– then he would speak and the words would come out in English, and everything will be fine. Dean can't, though. He can feel a painful thickness starting up in the back of his throat.

Cas looks across at Dean, a frown buckling his forehead into deep creases, and he says, "Hva er det?" The words hang in the air for several long seconds, with no other sound between them except the dim murmur of the water against the pebbles, and the distant scream of a circling bird.

Dean swallows. "Cas, you're—" He doesn't finish; his throat closes up and he can only let out a long shaky breath. He gestures ambiguously with one hand, waving around near his neck and mouth.

It doesn't matter; by that point, Cas realises what he's done. He sits back, his shoulders dropping loose as though all the bones have gone from him, and he tips his chin up to look at the sky as though that's where he'll find an answer. "Jeg snakker Norsk," he says, slowly at first, his voice barely a whisper, but then it picks up both in speed and volume as something like panic sets in. "Dean – Dean, hva er det som skier med meg? Jeg klaer ikke stoppe—" louder and louder, and shaky now, and his hand starts bunching into a fist, loosening again, bunching up, in an abrupt repetition as sharp and unnatural as watching a mechanical door lock and unlock, and Dean doesn't know whether Cas is consciously controlling that either— "Dean, der et noe galt med meg, jeg klaer ikke stoppe—"

"It's okay," Dean cuts across him, and he gets up to crouch next to Cas, and he takes Cas' hand in both of his own. He's crossed over into calm, somehow. Cas' fear has triggered in Dean the understanding that has to take control here – Dean is the human one, Dean is the engineer, Dean is one with sturdy hands and a reliable brain and free will to work them the way he wants, and so he has to look after Cas. He curls both his hands around Cas' fists, rubbing his thumbs comfortingly over the top of Cas' knuckles until his hand stops violently twitching and jerking like they're out of control. "It's okay – I got you, alright? I got you. I can fix this. I saw Gordon do it, and you know what, it didn't even look that hard. I've got this in the bag, dude. Can you understand me?"

Cas' eyes fall from the sky above him to fix on Dean's face, and he nods jerkily, the movement too fast and a little frenzied.

"Good – that's a start," Dean tells him. "At least you're not totally – whatever. Finnish?"

"Norsk," Cas says.

"Yeah. That." Dean smiles at him, and squeezes his hand. "I can fix this, Cas. You're gonna be fine. Just take a second to calm down, breathe, and I'll sort you out. Don't freak out on me, man. I got you."

Cas inhales deeply, and his hand relaxes underneath Dean's touch. He breathes out.

Once Cas is calm, Dean lets go of his hand and turns back to retrieve his toolkit from the back pouch of his webbing. He finds a screwdriver, replaces the metal head with the smallest one he has at his disposal, and shifts up onto his knees to kneel at Cas' back. Focusing on what he's seen Gordon do when Hester broke down and on trying to replicate the actions as closely as possible, Dean pushes the collar of Cas' combat suit out of the way and carefully slides the sharp slope of the screwdriver under the seam of Cas' skin at the nape of his neck. "Hold still," he warns him, and he peels back the skin to expose the hardware underneath, where there should be some controls somewhere to indicate language settings. There's a small hatch with a smooth plastic lid, which Dean flips up, and underneath it he finds a whole gallery of small switches and dials and little flashing lights to play with.

"Lingvistiske feil er et resultat av funksjonsfeil innenfor min intern programmering," Cas says quietly as Dean works, and he stares out across the hard blue glint of the lake's surface. "Dette er ikke en vanlig skade – jeg er ødelagt."

"Dude, I have no idea what you're saying," Dean tells him with a short laugh. "Just hang on one hot second, okay, and I can talk to you properly."

When Cas speaks next, his voice is so soft that he's barely audible to Dean even if he had been speaking English, and there is something to his tone like defeat. "Vi jommer oss ikke til havet."

"Well, babe, you just say the darn sweetest things," Dean teases, but Cas doesn't answer. His eyes drop for a second, fall to his hand where it lies limply in his lap, and Dean gets the feeling he's said something wrong, but he doesn't know why or how to apologise for it.

After that, Cas is silent for quite some time, and so they sit together in the hush, Cas looking out across the water while Dean kneels behind him and works on fixing the linguistics malfunction – a lot of guess-work, on Dean's part, because he knows what several of the controls do, and therefore it's by process of elimination that he calculates which dial is correct one for his problem. He has a fairly good knowledge of electronics outside of his pre-departure training on the Androids, but it's still more an hour until he can work out confidently what to do to restore Cas to his default language set-up, and the sun is low over the craggy ridge of the canyon mouth above them, casting its dim red lullaby over the water before it sets, when finally Dean fixes the problem and re-sets Cas into English.

"That better?" Dean asks, just to check.

"Yes," Cas says. "Thank you." He's speaking English again, but his voice is flat and toneless as the day Dean first met him, and for a couple of heart-stopping seconds Dean thinks that maybe he's done too much – maybe he's re-set Cas entirely, back to factory settings, and he now has no recollection of Dean beyond the functional – except that when Dean lays a hand on the curve of Cas' shoulder up to his spine, Cas jerks, almost flinches. Something else is wrong.

Dean folds away the lid to Cas' main controls, flattens the synthesised skin back over, and runs his thumb along the neat seam at his neck to ensure that there's no trace of the break. "Good as new," he says brightly, but still Cas makes no move to indicate relief or gratitude. He just sits there, his eyes away towards the lake and the bright, open stretch of blue sky that sunset has not yet touched, and Dean thinks maybe his hearing has gone again.

"Cas?" Dean says uncertainly, and he shuffles around to where he was sitting earlier, so that he can look Cas in the face – so that Cas can see his lips moving and respond. "Are you okay?"

Cas nods.

"Okay, that's good," Dean says sarcastically, although he keeps his voice gentle, "because for a second there I was worried that you suddenly turning Norwegian might have meant there was a serious problem!"

Cas doesn't dignify that with a response.

Dean lets out a long sigh. "Languages. That's an internal fault, isn't it?" he says.

At least Cas recognises this last statement. He inclines his head like he's about to nod, but then seems to get lost halfway, and with his chin tilted upwards, he says quietly, "I'm running low on fuel."

Dean stares at him. "What?" he says, so taken aback that at first he can barely process what Cas has said. "What do you mean? How's that even possible? I thought your fuel supplies were supposed to last until the end of the landing expedition – I mean, we're still technically scheduled to be with the squad for like, another week!"

Cas still doesn't look at him. "The supplies are supposed to last that long," he says, and then he hesitates, his mouth hanging slightly open like he's struggling to pull the words out of his throat, before he goes on to say slowly, in careful, delicate tones, "but I'm broken."

Dean swallows. "Broken how?"

Cas exhales heavily. "Although we're only prototypes, Android Angeles are theoretically designed to be self-reliant," he tells Dean, in the flat, emotionless tone of someone to whom none of it even matters anymore. His brow creases up in the middle; his shoulders hunch tiredly inwards. "Our technology is intelligent enough that it can repair itself – mostly. The fact that problems even become externally noticeable is the result of our having already exhausted all our capacity for repairs… although that isn't to say that we don't keep trying." He looks down at where his hand sits in his lap, fingers curled loosely in like a dead thing. "It may have escaped your notice, Dean, but I'm falling apart."

Dean gives a short nod, his mouth pressed tightly closed, and doesn't say anything. He sits back slowly, thinking suddenly of how much gas Cas must have used up trying to repair his hearing before Dean noticed anything was wrong – how much gas he must still be getting through, with all these little inconsistencies – and he rubs one hand roughly over his face. "Oh, okay," he says, because he doesn't know what to say, and then, "Jesus. Jesus Christ." He takes a deep breath. "So, uh, what happens when you run out of fuel?" he asks hesitantly. "Is it just like an engine where you top her back up and she gets going again, or is it more… final?"

"I've never run out of fuel before, Dean, I don't know what happens," Cas snaps. "At the moment I don't even know if—"

He cuts himself off abruptly, and falls again into silence, this time with his mouth clamped tightly shut, and Dean has a sneaking feeling of dread that Cas was on the verge of spilling something that would've destroyed everything they've set out with so far.

"You don't even know if what?" Dean prompts, looking at him intently.

Cas breathes. "I don't even know if my internal systems will continue to function long enough to find out," he finishes.

Dean thought it was going to be something like that. He curls one hand into a fist and bounces his knuckles agitatedly against his mouth. "Right," he says. "Right. Yeah."

Cas opens his mouth, but then seems to think better of whatever he was going to say. His mouth is downwards-turned, regretful, and there's an apology in the deep lines that cut through his brow, but he doesn't voice it. He doesn't say anything, and neither does Dean, and they sit on the rocks with the water an insidious sound creeping into the background of their every breath, and the sun goes down.

  


Arizona doesn't look much different from Utah. Dean doesn't know what discernible difference he was expecting, but there isn't any – baked red dirt, dry prickly grass, and the sun hot and yellow above them. Up from the lake, it's another two miles south until the Colorado river splits: one new river branching off steeply towards the Grand Canyon, the other dwindling thinner and thinner southeast.

Dean and Cas don't technically want to go south-east. They want to go south-west, but it's hard to argue with thirty foot of churning water as it tries to direct you somewhere else. Dean jokingly suggests one day that they might just have to jump it, to which Cas has a whole list of scientific reasons why it would never, ever work and says that it's a ridiculous idea, except that as the river progresses west, it slows and stretches itself out narrower and slower, with the canyon gradually closing above it. Some seven or eight miles later, the gap between the two ridges is only about two yards across, despite still being deep enough that to fall down would mean pretty certain death, and as Cas studies it, he comes to the conclusion that actually, jumping might be the only way across. Dean gives him a deliberately obnoxious look, and retorts in his most dead-pan impression of Cas' gravelly tones that it's scientifically impossible and absolutely ridiculous. Cas ignores him. They jump.

After that, it's another eight miles back to where they had originally wanted to be, following the I-98 south, and it takes them a whole day where previously they would've been able to cross that distance and then some. They're walking more slowly, now.

Cas used to set the pace – not that it was always good, since he set it fast and unrelenting, and Dean often struggled to keep up – and since his revelation at the lake, he walks more slowly. At first, Dean thinks he's doing to save fuel, but then as the miles bleed together and they beat their path onwards under the unfaltering eye of the sun, and as Cas grows ever slower, Dean realises that he's not doing it consciously. He's just exhausted.

Dean takes to holding his hand as they walk, and talking to him constantly. They're both content with silence, he knows that, but in the quiet there's too much room for thinking, and Dean doesn't know about Cas, but he knows that his own thoughts always spiral around the same things – Cas, low on fuel, a hundred miles from anywhere – so instead he talks.

He bitches and gossips about the rest of the squad – that time that he asked Cassie out to on the formal evenings hosted by the senior officers and she laughed in his face; how he never really spoke to Kevin before but he seems like a really great guy; how Gordon can be a pain in the ass sometimes but he's cool, and besides he reminds Dean a lot of himself sometimes with his narrow-minded determination; that time in high-school when Victor started a fire in a trashcan to rebel against The Man, back before they knew each other personally, when Victor was just a myth that the loser kids told around the campfire. He talks about Sam, a lot. He tells him everything about Sam, from what he was like as a kid, to how he ended becoming a doctor, and he tells him about this nurse back at base that Sam's into at the moment. He tells Cas about his mom.

Cas doesn't have much to contribute to these conversations, since he has none of his own experiences to share beyond what he has been through with Dean, but he listens attentively. Sometimes he asks his own questions. He watches Dean's mouth move.

After two days' walking, the I-98 curves away west, and they break away south again through the open terrain. They're just about three miles free of that road when Cas stumbles for the first time.

Luckily, Dean's holding his hand, so he just tightens his grip and holds Cas steady, and watches him for a couple paces afterwards to make sure he's okay. He asks, as well, but Cas snaps at him, says he's not a child, and so Dean doesn't say anymore, but Cas holds on tight to his hand.

Cas can't move with the weight on his back, and so the way they move has to change drastically, and without much leeway for adaptation. They have to cut down to one pack between them, which means they have to lose half their supplies – prioritising water and food, but conveniently, they're very low on both, so that doesn't take up much space. For the last two days, they've had nothing but dry oatmeal-and-raisin bars, and those they've had to ration carefully, because the thought of literally having no food left at all is one that turns Dean cold with dread. Having been able to fill their canteens up at the lake, however, they at least have more of that. They can keep going; they'll be fine.

The next time it happens, the following day and some nine or ten miles later, Dean doesn't have hold of Cas' hand. When Cas trips, he hits the ground hard – his knees first, and then he only has one hand to prop himself up, and he goes down with a smack, his head bouncing against the dirt.

"Shit," Dean exclaims, and he jerks his arms out of the straps for his pack, letting it fall backwards into the dust, so that his hands are free to help Cas. He hauls his rifle away from his side first, to leave his hand free, and then he grabs a handful of Cas' combat suit to help pull him up. "Shit, man, what happened – are you okay?"

Cas plants his hand solid on the ground, and slowly pushes himself back up onto his knees. He lets out a long breath, but it's shaky. "I'm fine." He stands up without assistance, leaving Dean's hand bunched uselessly into the fabric of Cas' jacket, and rolls his shoulders back. The palm of his hand is all scratched up, even if it's only synthesised skin, and he grimaces down at it for a moment before he lowers it to his side. He inhales, holds it in. "How much further is it?"

Dean takes his hand and curls their fingers comfortingly together. "Not far," he lies.

  


The sun is at its highest point in the sky, and Cas' legs give out.

Having learnt from Cas' previous clumsy moment, Dean has taken to ensuring that he holds Cas' hand whenever they walk any distance, just to be sure that he isn't going to end up face-down in the dirt again, and so when Cas' knees buckle underneath him, Dean is able to lock his arm tight and keep him from hitting the ground. He swears under his breath and waits a couple seconds for Cas to straighten up and get moving again, except he doesn't, and the muscles in Dean's arm are starting to strain from the effort of holding him up, and Cas is still making no move to support himself. "Shit," he mutters. "Cas? You okay, buddy?"

Cas mumbles some unintelligible response, but makes no move towards helping himself up, and so Dean has no choice but to shift his pack on his shoulders, kicks his rifle out of the way where it swings at his side, and reach across with his arm to grab a fistful of Cas' combat jacket and drag him upright.

"Come on, Cas, just put a little weight on your feet," Dean urges. "Just a little, that's all I'm asking, you're a goddamn dead-weight here. Come on, dude, you're the one who's meant to be indestructible – you're meant to carry me!" He gives a short, forced laugh, trying to make light of the situation, but as the words leave his mouth he realises just how royally fucked they are, because he's human and fragile and bone-tired and riddled with a thousand small injuries that make his life a living hell, and Cas was meant to be the sturdy beacon he followed south, and if it does come down to Cas needing to be carried, then Dean doesn't think he can do it.

"Dean, I—" Cas trails off, and his breath comes out with a dry sound like the rattle of dislocated plastic skittering about on metal. "I'm not okay."

"Yeah, I get that," Dean says, and he drags Cas a little closer so that he can sling Cas' arm around the back of his neck. "Hold on, I'm gonna lift you. You alright? Okay, here we go—" and he pulls Cas up, shifting his hand from holding Cas' to slipping around his waist and propping him up securely against his side. "How's that?"

Cas presses his forehead into the crook of Dean's neck. "Dean, I don't know what to do," he says, blurting the words out quickly, and so quiet that he's barely audible, like he's ashamed of it.

"Well, luckily for you, you can leave that to me," Dean says, so cheerfully it hurts, in an attempt to hide the weariness seeping all through his body, and he squeezes Cas tight around the waist. "We're gonna walk. And then we're gonna walk a little bit more – and if you're really lucky, we might even walk a little further."

And they do. With the sun fiercely yellow above them and casting its soporific golden light on their skin, they stumble the next mile, and the one after that – but it takes them all day, and sometimes Dean sways dizzily under the heat and exertion, and his own knees buckle but he locks them tight and stands frozen until he feels steady enough to go on. Sometimes Cas can support his own feet, and staggers slowly alongside Dean, but most of the time he can't, and he grows ever more incoherent until eventually there's some shift, and his mumbling is in French, and Dean doesn't have the energy to set Cas down and repair him – even though he knows that as he lets Cas continue, broken and language-impaired, that his own body will be fighting to fix a problem with no solution.

Dean's right – they walk, and they walk, and they walk, and always with the sun a hazy, wavering disc above them to cast the air a thin, brittle yellow like old paper, and there are clouds, thin and wispy overhead. They continue through the night as well now, because Dean knows that if he stops to sleep, he'll never get up, and Cas will power down or worse.

Dean can feel his feet are bleeding, his socks caked hard and sticky inside his boots, and his legs shake with every step. He talks to Cas, still – "do you remember that joke Sam told you? Brown and sticky? See, it's stupid, but it's a pun as well, like the one with the newspaper that you liked. Because you assume that the word sticky means like, like old candy is sticky – but it's just sticky – stick-like – because it's a stick. You get it now?" – and he tries to teach Cas the words to Hey Jude, because there's something solid and comforting about their footsteps to the beat of the na-na-na-nanana-na at the end, and he's singing a sad song to make it better.

  


They've been going for seventeen days. They're out of food now, and there's the tiniest trickle of water left at the bottom of Dean's canteen, but no matter how thirsty he gets, he refuses to drink it, because if he does then there won't be any water left at all, and that's worse than having one sacred millimetre at the bottom of a metal can to carry to hell and back. The days weigh heavy on him; his knees are near to buckling. The sun is hot and the earth is dry, and he finds himself whispering 'I'm sorry' to Cas, over and over until his voice cracks and gives out completely, and then he looks up one day, eyes turned blearily to the horizon for any hopeful sign, and he finds himself staring at a small group of people – three of them, and holding weapons with muzzles currently turned towards him.

Dean isn't afraid of them. He is so completely beyond giving a shit about whether he gets shot to pieces; all through him, there is just bone-deep relief at having found some form of civilisation, and he finds a grin breaking out across his face. He's been chewing unconsciously at the walls of his cheeks, and when he smiles, his teeth are red with blood. He walks towards them.

As he gets closer, the group becomes more distinct and separates into a small dark-haired woman, a burly man with a beard and a flat-cap, a woman in a beat-up jacket, and a very large dog. Both of the women hold rifles, one of them with a sniper sight attached; the dog is holding a tennis ball, which it abandons as Dean approaches. They have no official military clothing; they're decked out in ragged jeans, boots, and heavy jackets over light T-shirts. Some of them have enemy insignia stamped on their weapons, but scratched white and blistered like someone tried to pick the stamp off.

"Put your hands above your head," the taller of the two women barks out, the one in the jacket, and she pulls her rifle tight into her shoulder.

"I can't," Dean calls back hoarsely. "My friend – he can't walk—"

The dog eyes Dean and Cas suspiciously and, seeming to find nothing trustworthy about them, curls its upper lip back into a warning snarl. The taller woman turns the safety catch of her rifle off with a resonating click, and Dean stops dead where he stands.

"I'm sorry," he shouts. "Don't shoot!" He shifts Cas' weight on his shoulder, and Cas lolls heavily against him, his face pressed into the side of Dean's neck. "Cas, you gotta get up. Come on, man, just this once."

"Je peux pas," Cas mutters into Dean's throat, his breath hot and wet on Dean's already-sweaty skin. "Dean, je – je pense que – j'vais tomber—"

Dean doesn't know what that means, but it doesn't sound good. "Please, he needs help," Dean tries calling across the distance again, clinging to Cas' deadweight as they sway like so much dry grass. "Do you have any fuel?"

The woman with the rifle currently pointed into Dean's face frowns at him, and her lips pucker like she's been sucking limes for a living. "Fuel?" she echoes. "What the hell do you want fuel for? You one of those boys who only likes to fuck car exhausts when they're rumbling?"

"Do you have any?" Dean grits out.

The woman narrows her eyes witheringly. "Sweetie, if we had any fuel, do you really think we'd still be here?" she sneers.

Dean's heart sinks. "Are you sure?" he asks, with one desperate last hope that maybe they're bluffing because they don't trust him, maybe they've got huge supplies of gas tucked in a house somewhere and everything's going to be just fine – and at that moment, Cas' knees give out again.

He's too heavy for Dean to support alone, especially not on a week of heat exhaustion and minimal food, and they both crash to their knees in the dirt, Cas slumping even as Dean grabs two handfuls of his shirt to keep him upright. "Cas – Cas – come on, get up – you have to get up, man. Don't do this to me, Cas, we're so close—"

"What's wrong with him?" the man asks, his voice a thick, low drawl like caramel.

Dean looks up at the small band of rebel militia again, with the profound feeling that at this stage he doesn't even know if he wants any assistance from them, they've been so fucking unhelpful, but he can't turn help when they need it. "He needs fuel," Dean says breathlessly, panting hard from the effort of trying to keep Cas up.

The smaller, dark-haired woman eyes Cas sceptically. "What is he?"

"A person who needs fuel," Dean snaps.

"I'm sorry, brother, but we don't have any," the man insists, but he looks genuinely apologetic, and he steadies the dog with a hand to the back of its head and a low repetition of 'easy, boy'. "You can imagine gas was in pretty high demand when the bombs were coming down, and the stations shut long before that."

"There must be some, somewhere," Dean insists, and his voice cracks because no matter what he says or does, he can't shut down the realisation in the back of his mind that there was fuel with his squad, and in their ships, and in their base, and that if they hadn't started out on this impossible journey then this wouldn't be happening. He adjusts Cas' arm around the back of his neck and wraps his own arm tighter around Cas' waist as he tries to stagger the two of them back on their feet again. "Please – anything I have that you want, you can have. My rifle, my ammunition – I'm out of food and water, but you have my suit if you want – it's radiation-resistant, borderline bulletproof at the chest and back – you can have it, if it fits anyone. Just help me find some gas."

"We don't want your goddamned clothes," the short, dark-haired woman says. Her mouth curls as though in disgust, and she says curtly to the leader, "Jesus Christ, can we just let them up? The most trouble they'd cause would be the stink of their rotting corpses if we don't let them in."

The woman in the jacket and loose curly hair looks sharply across at the other woman. "That's really funny," she says slowly, her eyes narrowed in an expression without a trace of humour anywhere, "because I could have sworn you were second -in-command. And if I'm still here… well! Golly-gee. Will you look at that? Your orders don't mean jack."

"Come on, Meg, just look at them!"

Dean breathes heavy and ragged, inhaling dust where he kneels, and stares across the space at them like they're the only candle in an all-dark room. In his arms, Cas doesn't move. "Please."

"If they're Alliance, Eve'll want to talk to 'em," the man cuts in, and he steps forward to smooth one broad hand along Meg's upper arm, and he throws a wary glance at the other woman. "We don't have to keep 'em, but we should take 'em back."

Meg snaps a disapproving look at him, but when she looks back at Dean and Cas, the challenge is gone from her face. "Fine," she says. She lowers her rifle muzzle. "Then you can look after them, Ruby. And you can also be the one to put them down, if you're wrong. Benny? Bring them in." She whistles to the dog, then, and it lowers its hackles and bounds towards her inelegantly. They head off together immediately, and don't wait for anyone else.

Benny and the other woman, Ruby, approach Dean and Cas carefully – taking their webbing and their rifles, slinging them over their own shoulders and then giving them a brief pat-down to check for other weapons or hidden explosives.

"You need any help with him?" asks the man referred to as Benny, with a peremptory nod at Cas, once they've both been deemed clear.

Dean shakes his head. "No, it's okay – I've got him."

Benny raises his eyebrows, something like a chuckle of disbelief in his mouth. "You sure? He looks—"

"I said I've got him," Dean says sharply.

Benny holds his hands up as though in surrender. "Alright. Suit yourself. Come on – this way." He turns and follows Meg, while Ruby brings up the rear, trailing behind Dean and Cas at a snail's pace as they stagger haltingly in.

Together Meg and the enormous dog lead the way over the rocks and dead grass towards town. As they walk, Dean catches sight of a single painted-lady butterfly mid-dance between tangles of flowers in the low scrap of dry shrubbery, but before he has time to try and point it out to Cas, who he's sure would love butterflies, it disappears. Dean catches sight of it again later, a twitching orange smear on the sole of Meg's boot. He doesn't mention it to Cas at all.

The rebels are a mile or so out on patrol, but within twenty minutes, Dean spies dilapidated buildings rising out of the dust ahead of him, run-down houses constructed from wood and aluminium that seems to prop themselves up against the trunks of bare-branched trees groaning from the weight of their own wood. They follow a winding trail that only the three rebels seem able to see, weaving between the houses, and a few faces peer out through metal grilles over the window before disappearing again, but Dean pays them no attention. They're heading for the old church.

The church leans haphazardly over to one side, seeming to stay upright only through faith, and every stained glass window but one has been blown out and boarded over. There's a spray of blood on the front wall, just over the sign that declares the name of the church, now illegible. Meg shows them to the door, one arm thrown out in a pointedly theatrical gesture of welcoming, and then watches them go in with an expression of shrewd distrust.

Inside, the church is heavily militarised. Only a handful of pews remain, and have mostly been pushed back against the walls of the church and rebuilt into weapons' tables, or propped up near the door in what Dean assumes could at a moment's notice be transformed into a barricade across the entrance. There are men and women working in there, repairing weapons or building new ones out of scrap metal; there are kids that couldn't be older than fifteen building bombs out of kitchen products, with reference to a single stick of dynamite which has broken down to observe the chemicals that make it up. That dynamite stick is treated with reverence – only the eldest of the kids is allowed to touch it.

Dean limps into the centre of the room, ignoring the hostile stares of the rebels that turn towards him, and he tries to support Cas as best he can while they wait. He wishes there was somewhere he could set Cas down – a chair, or even just a step – but there's nothing of any comfort in this hollowed-out church, and he's unwilling to just leave Cas on the floor.

They don't have to wait long, however; within a few minutes, a tall, slender girl with straight dark hair descends the curving stairs from the old organ balcony with neat, echoing, authoritative steps. Her long ponytail swings pendulously; she wears a floral dress, and her boots have metal toe-caps that glint in the dim light from the last of the stained glass windows. "Afternoon," she says, in a soft voice like wind chimes. "What brings you to my humble settlement?"

"Are you Eve?" Dean asks warily.

She bestows on him a smile about as warm as a cryogenics facility. "And who are you?"

"My name's Dean," he says, and he nods towards Cas, still tucked under his arm, "and this is Cas." Remembering what Ruby had said earlier about why Eve would want to see them, he adds, "We're Alliance riflemen. We got separated from our squad."

Eve hums. "I see. But of course, Ruby here," she says, and she flicks a glance that Dean supposes is meant to look grateful in the direction of the same dark-haired woman who vouched for Dean and Cas' safe-conduct earlier, before she returns her eyes to Dean with a gaze that is cool and slightly distant, as though she's staring straight through him., "she tells me you came from the north of here. Only I find that a little hard to believe, because see, there's hardly anywhere north of here for hundreds of miles."

"You're telling me," Dean mutters.

Eve raises her eyebrows. "Then it's true?"

"Yeah, it's true – we came from Utah, over the plateau – not to be rude, here," Dean says irritably, "but as nice as all this small-talk is, chicken soup for the soul and all, we do actually need some goddamned help."

"Fuel."

Dean bobs his head. "Yes, ma'am."

"Why do you need fuel?" she challenges, her eyes narrowing.

"Secret ingredient in my mom's banana bread recipe," Dean says irritably. "You hungry?"

She smiles again, like a dark room being abruptly illuminated by a single light bulb whose glow doesn't reach the furthest corners where the shadows and cobwebs are thickest. "You're funny."

Something about the way the compliment turns brittle in Eve's mouth leaves Dean cold all over, and instinctively an apology rises in his throat, but he gets the better of himself before he voices it; he clamps his mouth tightly shut and says nothing.

"We don't have any fuel for you," she goes on once she sees that he's been silenced. "Please don't doubt our generosity – as it is, I'll send my lieutenant to check whether any can be found for you nearby, but I would advise you not to expect a positive outcome. In any stead, you'll be cared for here. You'll have food and water and lodging, as payment for your equipment and your services within the community."

"You want me to help the elderly with their bags? Cross the road, maybe, so they don't get run down by that stream of heavy traffic whizzing by right outside?" Dean says sarcastically.

Her mouth curls up into another hard smile. "You'll teach us how to use your equipment and how to adjust it to our needs. You'll help make weapons, if that's within your skillset, and you'll help to maintain some of the older buildings if it's not." She speaks musically, with a voice that is lilting and breathless, a voice to make people lean in closer to hear her better. Her words, however, are sharp. "Nothing too excessive – you're not a slave, and nor are we unnecessarily cruel. What we are is careful: we do what we must to survive. If any of this sounds unsavoury to you, then by all means turn us down. We are more than happy to return you to the desert."

Dean takes a deep breath. Of course there was a catch – but he and Cas have been walking for close to three weeks, without any supplies, and with Cas slowly deteriorating every step of the way, and so far it seems the rebels have been careful not to give them anything that would help them before they've agreed to this unofficial contract. Hoarse and ragged as he is, Dean has still not been offered any water; Cas, who they don't yet know isn't human, is barely held up from collapsing onto the floor and has not been offered a chair.

"No, thanks," Dean says. "That won't be necessary. I'm sure we'll settle in here just fine."

This time, when she smiles, she shows her teeth. "Perfect," she says gently. "I knew we could come to some kind of agreement. Then, barely tilting her chin left towards her shoulders to address the men and women behind her, she orders, "Strip them." Her eyes don't leave Dean's. "I want their packs, their equipment, their weapons – even their uniform. And search them. Get one of the kids to find them some civilian clothing in the meantime, and send them over to the town hall." She turns, then, in a slow glide that has the floral skirt of her dress churning lazily about her knees, and she looks across at Benny with her sharp jaw lifted high. "Benny, you find them a room. I want them looked after."

"Yes, ma'am."

Benny steps forwards, and he gives Dean a nod with a reassuring half-smile. At least this time he knows better than to offer to help Dean in supporting Vas' weight. However, as it turns out, an offer to help would have been pointless anyway, because as Benny approaches, Cas' hand shifts where it's draped inelegantly around Dean's neck – first, just twitching, and then he pulls away a little so that his hot, damp hand plasters against the side of Dean's neck, as though to cling on for support, and then he stands.

His legs are shaky beneath him, but he draws himself upright, and slowly his head lifts to take in his surroundings. Dean watches him; Cas blinks several times, like he's getting his eyes in focus, and then his gaze pans over the church – the cluttered heap of pews; the cold grey flagstones, worn smooth with many years; the high arch of the ceiling to a point above him; the old wood of the organ balcony, its parapets carved with fearsome angels in various states of wrath and love. Then, at last, he comes to the stained glass window at the very back of the church, above the battered altar now laden with weaponry, and his expression changes completely. In spite of all his fatigue and his broken body, his face just softens into gentle awe, his eyes wide and his mouth slack, and he takes a step towards it.

At first, Dean thinks he's going to fall – one of his knees buckles beneath him, but he catches himself in time, and Dean's hand doesn't make a difference, stretched out to press against the small of his back in case he needs it.

He takes another step, and another, and Eve and her rebels don't even stop Cas from staggering up the dais steps and around the altar, his hand brushing reverently along the polished wood of the altar as he passes, and then he stops in front of the stained glass and he just looks at it. For several moments, he does nothing but stare. Then, taking in a long breath, he stretches out his fingertips and traces the black outline of one of the shards forming a saint's face, and he exhales. His hand flattens, pressing his palm to the glass, and he leans heavily against it as though it's the only thing holding him upright. "Qu'il est formidable de croire," he says.


	6. Chapter 6

They get strip-searched first, their uniforms, packs, webbing, and the contents of all their pockets taken from them, and they have civilian cloths thrust unceremoniously at them instead: ragged jeans with fraying cuffs, worn old shirts, and battered sneakers.

There comes a moment during the search when Ruby carefully unwinds the bandaging from the jagged stump of Cas' severed arm, and with Cas too weak and tired to protest, even when sitting down, he simply lets her. The bandage falls away into a heap of grubby scrap on the floor, and the exposed metal glints dully in the lamplight; one loose cluster of torn wiring dangles uselessly from the stump, and something metallic rattles faintly in a dislodged bracket as he lowers his arm.

No-one says anything about it – Ruby's eyes flash up uncertainly to meet Dean's, who she finds staring at her with an expression hard like a challenge. Ruby looks away and makes herself busy searching for a clean replacement bandage. She ties Cas' arm again, almost as neatly as Sam had, and if she tells anything else about what she discovered, there's no dangerous reaction to it; no-one comes demanding to see the cyborg freak or ask why he exists or to steal some of his technology, so Dean figures either they're used to bizarre technological oddities dropping in from the military, or they simply don't care.

Ruby sends some kid off to find a toolkit for Dean, and while they wait for him to come back, she shows them through to the old storage rooms at the back of the town hall, which have been hewn out of shelving units and crudely converted to spaces that tread a thin line between bedroom and prison cell. A grubby mattress takes up two-thirds of the floor space, its inherent dirtiness partly disguised by home-knitted blankets thrown over with bright, cheerful knit patterns, and there are pillowcases stuffed with old shirts and towels; in one corner stands a tall wooden crate to function as some kind of table; in the other is a stack of broken plywood that leans against the wall, which Dean guesses is either a very modern decorative art piece, or just here because no-one has decided what else to do with it yet.

"Welcome to the Hilton," Ruby says darkly, propping the door open with her foot to let them go in. "Aaron should be back in a second with your toolkit – you're welcome." And with that, she jerks her foot out of the door to let it slam loudly shut behind them, and she's gone.

For a moment, Dean doesn't say anything. He and Cas just stand in front of the closed door, each holding the other up with clutching hands, and then Dean jokes, "Home sweet home, I guess?" and Cas pulls away from him to stagger wearily to the bed.

Cas doesn't so much sit as he does fall, his hand splayed out wide to hold himself up, with fingers digging into the blankets as though he could claw straight through. He breathes heavily and open-mouthed; his chest heaves from the exertion, and his eyes close.

"Hey," Dean says softly, crossing to the bed, and he kneels on the floor in front of Cas. He reaches for him, holding on tight to his bandaged forearm, and with his other hand he bumps his knuckles gently along the line of Cas' jaw. "Hey, I've got you. It's okay."

Cas doesn't answer. He breathes, in and out, as though the simple action physically hurts him.

Dean's hand shifts; he skims his thumb over Cas' bottom lip. The breath that Cas lets out to wash over Dean's hand is stale, and it rattles. "Come on," Dean says, and he gets up to sit beside Cas on the bed, reaching over him to access the back of his neck.

The kid comes back with tools, and so Dean and Cas sit together in the quiet, dusty dark of the storage room that makes up their temporary safe-house, and Dean works his way under Cas' skin to turn him back to English. They don't speak, and once it's finished, Cas doesn't make any move to speak to Dean or to get up again, so for now Dean presses a light kiss to his hairline and leaves him.

He heads out into the community with the idea in mind to make himself useful in some way – if they've been granted safe conduct and a place to stay, then it's the least he can do.

He helps Eve and Alpha with their reconnaissance of the surrounding area by telling them what he and Cas saw on the way down from Utah, so that they can update their maps, and consequently, their defences. He helps with a lot of heavy lifting, as soon as he's got some food in him and his strength back; he lugs storage crates of old weapons and spare metal parts to be used for making new ones. He helps them to make weapons; he stuffs small quantities of explosives into home-made ammunition.

The bomb squad is mainly made up of children, due to their smaller, more dextrous hands for wiring , and there's one boy in charge, taller and dark-haired, named Jesse, and he supervises the rest of them – and it's incredible, this strange, highly militarised life, and with all the facets of an ordinary childhood. The kids make bombs individually, each in competition with the others for who can make the biggest, the baddest, the most complex-looking, the most powerful – they steal each other's parts and they throw their tools at each other when they argue and they help each other when they need an extra pair of hands.

They fuse detonators into packets of explosives while they bitch about the results of a baseball game that they all played together the other day, and for the longest time Dean can't place the ache deep in his stomach to watch it, until he realises that even with the addition of the bombs, these kids' interactions are somehow closer to those of his own childhood in Kansas, rather than the careful, sterile space environment into which he and Sam were shoe-horned as soon as they had enough money to get off the ground. His throat is tight with the realisation.

Dean is startled out of his reverie by the smooth, low rumble of a familiar voice: "How's it going, intruder?"

He blinks several times to clear his head of the preoccupation, and then he looks across at Benny. He's still holding two separate, useless, unattached chunks of metal; he sets them down on the table-top. "It's okay," he says. "I'm just, you know – trying to help. Give back to the community, or whatever."

Benny snorts. "Right."

Dean turns a tube of crumpled aluminium foil over in his hands, for want of something to do, and he opens his mouth, but then hesitates. He feels he needs to in some way express what this place means to him, even just as an idea – that he's grateful for their help; that their mere existence here against all odds incredible; that this place, just for its humanity, feels more like home than anywhere else he's been in ten years – but he doesn't know how. "This is really awesome," he says awkwardly, at last.

Benny gives him a weird look.

Dean flushes. He sets down the roll of foil, clears his throat, and as the turns his back on his work-bench and faces Benny, he clarifies, "What you've built here, I mean."

"Built?" Benny echoes. He laughs. "We ain't built anything here. Y'all just disappeared off into space and we got left behind – we've been here the whole time." With a low chuckle still rumbling in his throat, he looks down at the tools and parts laid out on Dean's table, he shakes his head. "No, man, we didn't build this – we just… endured."

Dean frowns. "But how?"

Benny's mouth flattens into an expression of bored resignation, and he shrugs carelessly. "We just stuck together, I guess," he says distractedly. "Remembered what was important – family, your heart, all that good Hallmark bullshit. Looking after each other. You know?" He glances up at Dean again and pulls a face. "Something like that, anyhow."

Dean nods. "Well, it's… it's really something," he says feebly, acutely conscious of how flimsy the words are as he says them, but he's not equipped with anything more eloquent, so he leaves it at that.

"That it is," Benny agrees distractedly, and as he picks up one of the table's screwdrivers to twirl between two fingers, something over his shoulder seems to catch his eye. He glances over, and gives a short laugh before he looks back to his hands. "Heads up - here comes the walking wounded."

At first, Dean just stares at him, bewildered, but when he turns to follow Benny's gaze, he sees what Benny had referring to – he can see Cas through the church doors, making his way slowly towards them, and someone has given him a walking stick.

It's a nice idea, the walking stick, since Cas is still weak, and it sends a warm rush of gratitude up through Dean's chest, but in all honesty, Dean isn't sure that Cas has any practical knowledge of how to walk with one. He seems to be unsure of how to best support himself with it; he grips the end with one shaking, white-knuckled hand, and with each step he fumbles for a good placement of it in the ground beside him. He stumbles a little, and he moves slowly. Even from here, Dean can see his knees trembling under his own weight.

Cas spots them, squinting through the harsh sunlight, and he gives a curt nod to acknowledge them as he approaches.

Benny sticks his hands deep into the pockets of his pants. "How long does he have?" he asks conversationally.

Dean doesn't look at him. He narrows his eyes at Cas – at his heavy-footed, inelegant steps, at his long-fingered hands and downwards-turned mouth and the way he blinks, startled, when he steps into the church and has to make that adjustment between the yellow glare of daylight and the cool grey-stone gloom indoors. Dean exhales. "I don't know," he lies. "I – haven't really thought about it."

Benny huffs in disbelief. "You haven't really thought about it," he says. "Okay."

"Cas!" Dean calls, desperate to cut short this conversation with Benny as it steers off-topic and out of control, and he steps away from his work-bench to greet him. "How are you doing?"

Cas stops as Dean reaches him, and he shifts his borrowed stick to lean heavily on it. "I'm alright," he says, although his voice is faint. "Meg gave me some coffee. It had no physical effect, of course, but it was nice to be included – and it was warm."

"Right, because we so badly need to be a little warmer right now," Dean teases, and the tired line of Cas' shoulders twitch near a shrug. "You wanna sit down or anything?" Dean asks, noting the sag of his spine, the reddish indents in his hand where the top of his walking stick digs hard into his palm. "Did Meg give you the stick too?"

Cas nods, and then his eyebrows pull crossly together in the middle. "She said I looked pathetic, stumbling around the place like – little Timmy without his crutch?" he tries, and he looks up at Dean with confusion. "What does that—?"

Dean gives a short laugh and one hand finds its way to rest lightly on Cas' shoulder. "Don't sweat it."

A derisive voice lifts from the other side of the church to interrupt them: "Can you get a room or get back to work – please!"

Dean's hand drops guiltily away from Cas, and he looks across to see a tall dark-haired woman glowering at him from over the top of a machine-gun she's diligently cleaning. When they make eye-contact, she arches her eyebrows at him. "Yeah, you – pronto."

Dean grimaces at Cas, but he's in no position to argue with orders, so he pulls up a chair for Cas to sit down beside the kids working on the bomb – Dean figures his dextrous, mechanical hands and ridiculous capacity to know a little about everything may as well be put to use – and they get back to work.

Cas is tiring – Dean can see it in the set of his mouth, the crinkles beside his eyes, and Dean knows that whatever little kick that got Cas going earlier, whether it was coffee or a walking stick or a desire to get up and make like a normal human being against all odds, has long since faded now. He's fading out like an old song on a badly tuned radio station, disappearing amongst the static of brighter things.

Dean decides they can take off early – they've done enough work for the day, seeing as they work fast, not being distracted by the childish chatter of their colleagues, especially since Jesse glowers suspiciously at Dean every time he so much as asks someone to pass him the oil – and he's just tidying away the tools he'd been using earlier when he catches what Cas is doing.

For the past hour or so, Dean has been dimly aware of Cas occasionally speaking to one of the younger children down at his end of the table as he works, but paid no real mind to it; he assumed that the kid was just bothering Cas in that small-minded, idle way kids have, but that Cas would be perfectly fine to handle himself.

Now, however, he looks over, and finds himself speechless as he sees Cas and a little boy of about seven or eight years old, quietly working together on an explosive as they talk. Cas, with only one hand, holds still a collection of parts, and then the boy clumsily winds duct tape around and around the incomplete bomb to hold the various parts together.

"—so is that what happened to your arm, as well?" the boy asks interestedly as he fumbles with the tape roll to pull out the next few inches.

"Actually, no," Cas says, his voice with a gentleness that Dean has not heard before, despite its usual matter-of-fact tone. "I lost my arm because it was poisoned."

The kid's eyes widen, but he doesn't seem too alarmed by the revelation. "My sister got bit by a rattlesnake like a month ago," he says. "Her whole foot went purple and for a while my mom thought we might have to cut that off, as well. Is that what happened to you?"

Cas watches as the kid fights to rip off another couple inches of tape. "Yeah," he says. "It was like that."

The kid comes up triumphant over the roll of tape, and together they apply the final level of sticky security to the outside of the bomb. Dean looks away.

With the coming of evening is word comes from Eve, who was true to her promise, and had sent out her lieutenant, one tall, middle-aged man who goes by the name of Alpha, in search of fuel, but despite his patrol heading out as far as the nodding donkeys that line the road north of Flagstaff, he comes back empty-handed. Dean is grateful all the same, and the Alpha promises to keep looking whenever they can spare the people for a patrol out.

They settle in, get comfortable. Dean, it is discovered, is good at testing newly built or freshly maintained weapons and working out whether there are any faults with them, or what could be done to improve them; Cas helps out wherever possible, with the kids or with the domestic support teams, which Dean can only imagine to feel like a blow to Cas, as a the mechanised perfect super soldier, but as the days tick by, he becomes less and less able to even perform the easier tasks of the community.

His legs are weak, and his hands shake, and his vision blurs so that he stumbles and drops things. It has reached a point where his linguistics core breaks down at least once a day, and while at first people joke that he could work as a language teacher, soon it gets more difficult to repair him; sometimes his core fails altogether and he can't speak at all. Those days, he sits back in their little room at the back of the town hall and stays secluded in the dark and the quiet and he waits to come back to himself. Dean is beginning to notice that, day by day, it takes him a little longer each time to come back to himself.

By the sixth day in Arnold, Cas is on his reserve fuel tanks. He stays most of the time in the bed provided for him, saving his energy for the actions that count; he's calculated that he can afford one large burst of activity per day before he becomes too exhausted to go any further, and so they save these moments for things that matter. They go on walks. They curl up together, fingers laced together – always touching, always – and they talk, sometimes. They lie in silence, sometimes, or they hobble the perimeter of the town, looking out at the dirt and the rock and the open sky. Each time they leave this room, Dean gets a rush of ridiculous, false hope that maybe everything will be alright.

The truth, though, is this: Cas is getting worse. He lies back, head propped up on his makeshift pillow, stuffed full of old towels and tattered shirts, and he stares up at the ceiling. His eyes are hollow and his mouth is slack, exhausted.

"I'm engineered to be stronger than you," he says tiredly, out of nowhere.

Dean lifts his head from where it rests on Cas' chest; he's caught out by the sudden start-up of conversation, and he blinks sleepily to clear his eyes and try to focus on what's happening. "Hmm?"

Cas sighs. "Me," he clarifies. "I'm meant to be stronger – than you, stronger than everyone. I'm supposed to be more durable and longer-lasting and more… more…" he struggles, his breath pent-up in his chest like an overfilled balloon as he searches for words, but he doesn't find them; he bursts. "I don't know. More."

Dean takes his hand, rubbing his thumb comfortingly back and forth over Cas' knuckles. "You're enough," Dean tells him. "You're—"

"Falling apart?" Cas finishes for him, and there's no bitterness in his tone – just an overwhelming sense of defeat. He meets Dean's eyes for a second, but then something pained finds its way into his expression – a tiny crumple of the mouth; the crease between his eyebrows – and he looks quickly away, towards the wall. "I thought I was going to be indestructible – that was the point, wasn't it? Never age, never tire, never flinch in the face of danger. You flinched," he says, and he jerks his head towards Dean, although Dean knows Cas doesn't intend any barb to it; for him it's just fact. "I used to look down on you for it, but I see now that it meant so much more for you to be brave. Courage," he goes on, and here his voice has grown so quiet as to be barely audible, as he stares away to the side, "it seems, comes not from doing courageous things, but rather from knowing real fear and having faith that what you believe in is more important."

Dean finds he can't look at Cas anymore, and he drags his eyes away to look down at their hands instead. He can feel a thickness in his throat, but he tries to speak anyway. He didn't think that Cas would be scared. "Cas—"

"Coming here with you, that's what I believe in," Cas says. "That walking away was worth more than any infinite number of tomorrows or next weeks. I'd rather shut down tomorrow than not have had these few weeks with you." He looks back at Dean, and Dean reluctantly lifts his head to meet his gaze. Cas' mouth is a twisted attempt at a smile while the rest of his face stays scrunched up with worry and fear. "That's what I believe in."

Dean tries to smile too. "I like that," he says, after a few seconds battling with getting his own voice to work. "I'll believe in that too."

There's a long moment where they simply look at each other. The room is quiet, with nothing to disturb them except the faint murmurings of other people in the nearby rooms and the rattle of the wind through the loose wooden slats over the windows. Cas shifts his hand slightly, moves so that their fingers lace together, and as he looks down at their hands like that, he says, "What's it like – being alive?"

Dean sighs. "You know I don't know how to answer that, right."

Cas frowns. "Try."

Dean takes a deep breath. "It's not that easy, man. It's not like – one emotion. Sometimes you're hungry. Sometimes you want to take a nap and just… stop thinking for a while, you know? Sometimes… sometimes you get gassy, and you have to plan carefully when you're gonna let it out, because there are a hell of a lot of situations where it's not exactly appropriate to start farting or whatever. And, yeah, it's also emotions and stuff, but it's just – feeling everything, all the time. It just never stops."

Cas thumps their clasped hands against the mattress in bratty frustration. "But what is that like?"

"It's like…" Dean hesitates. He's remembered their discussion last week, when they were high on the pine ridge over the river, and Cas' hand had malfunctioned, and Dean had run his fingers over Cas' skin and Cas had felt it. Dean swallows. "It's – it's like this," he says, and he slides his free hand under Cas' shirt.

Cas grows immediately still.

Feeling a little stupid, and with a hot blush rising in his neck and on his jaw, Dean trails his fingers lightly over Cas' chest and stomach. Cas' breath hitches a little at the touch, which is kind of irrelevant seeing as he doesn't actually need to breathe, but he's programmed to mimic human behaviour, and Dean knows what that means, for humans.

Dean leans over Cas, one hand brushing carefully over Cas' skin, and as he brings the other hand, still together with Cas', up to press into the mattress above Cas' head, he kisses him.

Cas melts a little underneath him, all soft and compliant with his mouth half-open as Dean nudges gently into Cas' bottom lip with his teeth, and then kisses him again, and again, as quick and careful as he can, each time with just the barest sweep of the tip of Dean's tongue along the ridge of Cas' mouth. Cas tilts his chin up like he's trying to get closer, trying to press in as tight as he can, and Dean takes advantage of Cas' up-turned chin to brush his lips along the hard line of his jaw, trailing kisses feather-light over his skin.

"You tell me - how does it feel, then?" Dean murmurs against the hinge of Cas' jaw, his mouth tucked into the space underneath Cas' ear, and his words are a warm wash of breath over his throat. "Being human?"

Cas makes a rough sound in the back of his throat, a sharp burst of air. "Overwhelming?" he says, his voice rising in a question like he still isn't sure, even when his breath comes quick and his chest pitches unevenly with every kiss that Dean presses to his body, every soft slide of his hand over his stomach. "Like I never want to stop?" he tries again, and Dean's mouth skates roughly down his throat, the long stretch out from where he's tipped his head back. There is the flutter of the closest thing he has to a pulse, some main cable up to the internal wiring in his brain, where his carotid should be, which beats in syncopation to Dean's own speeding heart. "Like everything is just—" Dean opens his mouth over Cas' collarbone, the barest scrape of teeth along the ridge of it, and Cas exhales in a burst, "—just so much more?"

Dean smiles, and the curve of it presses into the hollow of Cas' throat. "Good." He lets go of Cas' hand, pulls it back towards him, and then hooks both thumbs into the hem of Cas' T-shirt to lift it off him in one smooth jerk – Cas arching underneath him, shoulders rolling to be free of the sleeves. For a second the fabric gets caught on the ragged edge of Cas' broken arm, and Dean has to stop to pick the shirt carefully away from the metal and frayed cable-ends. Then, once free, Dean tosses the shirt blindly into some corner, and he shifts his position leaning over Cas so that he straddles his hips.

"Dean – Dean, wait – this isn't—" Cas looks at him, his eyes wide with something like fear, his mouth half-open with the wanting while his lips crumple down at the edges with not being sure that he's allowed. His hand finds Dean's forearm, clings on tight enough that his fingers dig in, and he swallows. "This isn't in my database."

"Then I'll put it in there," Dean tells him, and he kisses him again— "I'll write it across everything else you've got stored up in your head," –and again— "in capital letters," –and again— "all over your algebra and your battle tactics and your fancy words," –and again, their noses bumping together, "until you don't remember anything else." He pulls back for a second and stops, taking a moment to look seriously at Cas. "That okay with you?"

Cas' face softens a little, the fear dissolving into that curious scrunch of his eyes with the crows' feet reaching out at either side, like he's looking at some breath-taking and doesn't know what to do with it yet, and he nods. So Dean presses both hands to Cas' chest, fingers splayed out wide to feel that fleeting rush of vibrations under Cas' skin every time his sensory receptors are temporarily overloaded, and he crushes their mouths together, just soft enough to snag all the air out of their lungs.

Dean's hands skim lightly up, over his collarbones, fingers brushing into the hollows over his clavicles, the dent at the front of his shoulder, the base of his throat where his muscles flutter – and Dean places kisses there, gentle, open-mouthed. His breath rushes warm over Cas' skin.

Every touch is a lightning-strike – the rough, dry drag of Dean's lips; the clumsy bump of calloused fingertips scratching where Cas' skin is delicate – and Cas is rough-edged beneath him, breathing in bursts, in punches, his fingers flexing tight to cling to Dean's hand where it presses his palm down into the dirty mattress, and Dean kisses the slope of his shoulder.

"Dean," Cas whispers, his voice breaking up raw beneath the sensation; he swallows, hard, with the muscles in his throat beating dimly underneath his skin, and he stares up at the ceiling. "Am I human, now?"

Dean gives a short laugh and tilts forwards to bury his face into the crook of Cas' neck. One hand grazes lightly over Cas' ribs; the other squeezes Cas' hand comfortingly, and it's with his mouth tucked against Cas' pulse that Dean says, "Cas, you're whatever the hell you wanna be."

Cas breathes out, a long slow exhalation that deflates him, as though he was poured full to the brim with worry and fear, and with those easy words Dean has tapped him dry of everything except for the way they feel together, now. Dean tilts over, lifts himself up over Cas, and he kisses him – once, and again.

Dean has the strangest, abstract sense of labelling Cas, his every inch of skin, as though the distance from the squad to this room had torn them both apart, and here they are putting each other back together, piece by piece. Here – trapezius muscle, under the touch of Dean's mouth as light and fleeting as rainwater; deltoid; clavicle; the faint swell of his pectoral. Here is the dip of his sternum, and Cas is trembling under the contact – stomach muscles jumping nervously at every sweep of skin on bare skin, breathing like a marathon-runner when Dean touches a kiss to the dead centre of his chest, and Cas' whole body pitches frustratedly for more.

"Dean," he says roughly, "Dean – Dean—" and he clutches Dean's hand so tight it starts to hurt, so Dean, thinking in a panic that he must've hurt Cas somehow or done something that his systems can't process, stops in his tracks. He lifts his head, eyes wide with worry, to see what's wrong, but before he can so much as speak, Cas strains up with a breathless sound to press their mouths clumsily together.

"Cas," Dean manages between kisses, and he's at that shaky point where words are all mixed up in his mouth so that he has a hundred things roaring to be said and he can't pick apart the tangled threads of them to find a single distinct word of any real meaning. "Cas, I—" He can feel his brow scrunching up like he's fighting off something painful even though it's just his lips on Cas', so he presses his forehead hard against Cas' – and yet the more Dean struggles with himself, the harder it gets, his chest constricting tightly, and with his eyes screwed up closed, he struggles one last, desperate time: "I – Cas – you know I—"

"I know," Cas cuts over him, and Dean doesn't have his eyes open to see his face when he says it, but Cas' voice is shook up like broken concrete, and with their foreheads pressed together, they are breathing the same air, in and out.

  


Morning comes still and sleepy, the air thick as porridge in the heat over the aluminium roof. Dean wakes up plastered over Cas' body, his cheek smushed inelegantly against Cas' nipple, one arm thrown across Cas' chest for his hand to curl around the side of his neck. It's not beautiful, but it's fucking comfy, and even though Dean is wide awake with the early-hours readiness that comes with years of military training, he takes a moment just to bask in the moment.

Cas is warm to the touch and there is the grating buzz of cicadas outside like a broken air-conditioning unit and the whole day stretches languidly before them like a plateful of possibilities. Of course, they'll probably get dragged into helping the kids to build weapons again, but they might be able to snag some time off in the evening to wander down through the town. There must be sights to see, even if it just means walking to the edge of town and looking off again into that open expanse of red dirt and yellow light that presses in on them at all sides, but it's better than nothing.

He wriggles a little, flailing one leg to be free of the sheets tangled around his feet, and then nudges Cas by pushing his face into his side. "Morning, sleepyhead," he yawns. "You want some coffee?"

Cas doesn't answer, so Dean pokes him in the stomach with his index finger.

"Dude. Coffee?" he repeats, and he plants a kiss on Cas' ribs. "I'm speaking your language, right?" he checks, and then he props himself up on his elbow to look at Cas. "Café? Hot drink with beans in it? Cas, are you even—?"

He stops.

"Cas?"

Cas lies perfectly still, his eyes closed and his mouth soft like he's deep in sleep – except Cas doesn't sleep. At first, Dean is only concerned; panic seizes him slowly.

"Cas," Dean says again, worry colouring his voice this time, and he leans over to press two fingers under the hinge of his jaw. There's no pulse – Dean wasn't expecting one – but there's also no steady, reassuring thrum of vibrations passing information through his main cable. Dean sits up straight, then, takes a deep breath to steady himself, and says, "Power up."

For one heart-stopping second, nothing happens. After a few seconds, however, there's a low whirr, a clunk, and Cas' eyes flicker open.

Dean lets out a burst of air like he's been punched, breath that he hadn't realised he was holding, in a half-terrified laugh. "Cas," he says, his voice choked until it's nearly a sob of relief, and he sees recognition flash dimly through Cas' eyes as he sees Dean, and then his eyes fall half-mast, flutter, and close again.

Dean waits patiently for Cas to open his eyes. Any second now. Maybe something's gone wrong – he's a little rusty, after all, and his programming has been a little off recently. Dean clears his throat. "Android Angeles, power up," he says firmly. "Power up. Cas? Cas – power up."

Cas' eyelashes flicker again, like they're going to open, but don't – and Dean keeps going. He can hear his voice growing strained at the edges, thickening in the back of his throat, but he can't stop.

"Power up, Cas. Come on – Android Angeles, 5284-C-S-T-L – Cas, come on – power up." He's getting louder, he can tell; where previously there was a low, warm hum of indistinct voices working in rooms beyond, everything has now gone quiet.

He realises that at some point the hand he'd used to check Cas' vibrations has curled around the back of Cas' head with fingers fisted tight into his hair, pulling hard enough to hurt, and he's shaking him.

"Power up. Power up."

Under Dean's hands, Cas flops like a ragdoll, his head lolling from side to side, and his mouth falls open. For the first time, Dean can see all the metal inside it. His hands freeze where they are.

For a second, he considers CPR, but he knows that that it wouldn't do anything – there's no heart to restart, no lungs to manually pump full of oxygen. Back at the base, there might have be someone who knows how to kick-start Cas into life, but not here. Dean doesn't need any help remembering that if they'd stayed with the squad then Cas wouldn't have fallen apart. And here he is now, shut down.

Dean says the words out loud, quietly. "Shut down." It doesn't sound as finite as it feels – it sounds temporary, like you shut down a stupid idea or a computer. It doesn't sound like 'destroyed', which is how it feels to Dean.

Dean sits by him in silence for a while, and listens to the sound of his own breathing in the small room. Voices start up again in the hallway, softly at first, then louder, and Dean wonders if they know what's just happened. He wonders if they're discussing it, and if they think that he's crying in here. He wonders, faintly, then, whether he should be crying in here. He doesn't really believe that it's happened; he sits on the edge of the bed with Cas' face cupped in one hand, his whole body numb and expectant and a little bit frozen with the realisation that Cas isn't going to come back.

Cas is still warm, but in a tepid, disconcerting kind of way, from his metal and plastic absorbing the heat from the stuffy room, and so at last Dean lets go of him. It feels like he's rotting.

Slowly Dean gets to his feet. He stands naked in the middle of the room without any real idea of where to go or what to do, as his thoughts are all hollow and twist back to dead-ends, but finally he gathers enough of himself to put on clothes, and then he goes outside.

As soon as he opens the door, the cluster of people hanging around outside and talking in heated whispers fall into silence. They look at him with mixed expressions of uncertainty and sympathy, and Dean can't bear to look at any of them a second longer. He drops his gaze quickly to his feet and shuts the door tight behind him. "Morning," he mumbles.

Everyone choruses back at him some awkward variation of the same, al at once so that their voices jumble together and no one person is clear. Dean glances past them all in the direction of the main room, desperate to get out of there as fast as possible. "Sorry, guys, I've gotta…" he trails off, having no real answer, and he finds himself so exhausted and empty that he lacks even the strength to come up with a lie to fill the space. "You know. Sorry." Without meeting their eyes, Dean turns and moves towards the door, slow-footed and unfocused as though he's in a trance.

"Dean – wait," Benny calls after him, and he pushes out of the group to approach Dean, although he still stops a few yards back, and Dean reluctantly pauses in the doorway, one hand on the frame. Benny hesitates. "Cas – is he—?"

Dean nods. He ducks his head lower, suddenly finding that at last, now, when he's in front of other people, his eyes are burning at the corners and his throat is closing up tight. "Yeah," he says, and runs his tongue mechanically over his lips when his voice cracks. "He, uh. He's gone."

Benny's voice is low and soothing when he says, "I'm sorry, brother," but he's not Dean's brother and his sympathies don't mean shit.

Dean jerks his head loosely to acknowledge the sentiment, but he doesn't say anything. He drums his fingers on the door-frame briefly, and then he leaves without another word. He cuts straight across the main hall towards the front entrance, outside which he stops, sits down on the porch steps with his arms looped around his knees, and he looks out quietly across the road at the hard yellow dirt and the open sky as quiet and undisturbed as it was the morning before, as though nothing has changed.

  


Meg and Benny want to bury Cas; Ruby wants him cremated. Dean won't let them do anything to him. He knows what he's going to do with Cas.

The next day, he excuses himself from helping out testing the previous week's newly-built weapons out in the desert, and instead he finds his old pack from his squad's expedition, tucked under the rickety metal frame of his bed, and rummages through it for what old equipment the rebels hadn't yet been through. Some spare clothes; some gross, half-mouldy rations; a flat-packed cardboard box that used to carry extra rifle ammunition – and his old radio.

For several minutes, Dean sits in silence in the dark, with the radio held in both hands. At one point, he lifts the radio and presses it to his closed mouth, beats it dully against his chin as he thinks. Then, ultimately, he makes the decision; he flips it open, pulls out the antenna, and turns it on.

He takes a deep breath. "Warrant Officer Mills, this is Sergeant Winchester of Task Force Blue October - Fox Company, 53rd Rifle Regiment of the 176 Infantries - come in. Come in, this is Sergeant Dean Winchester…"

He goes on for the best part of hour, repeating himself until his message doesn't sound like words anymore, until his voice grows hoarse. What small home he had tried to build here is gone now, and he needs to get back to the last little bit of home he has.

"Warrant Officer Mills, come in – this is Sergeant Dean Winchester of Task Force Blue October. Come in. This is Sergeant Winchester speaking." He clicks off the broadcasting signal to wait. He's bone-tired, with a hollow despondency all through his body like a weight heaped upon his back, and his voice is quieter now. Without any track of the passage of time except for the light that is dimmer now through the slats over the windows, that falls in faint strips the colour of gold and old grass over his hands and legs. He's come a very long way, and all he wants now is to go home.

Dean tips his head back, closes his eyes, and breathes. The air in the room is thick with dust and heat settled heavy into the walls and floorboards, with a smell that's all dry dirt and sharp grass and Cas. He inhales deeply, filling his lungs until he feels like he's full to the brim, the smell of it spilling out of his mouth.

"Sergeant Winchester, this is MB-8 Impala pilot Warrant Officer Mills, do you copy? Over."

Dean exhales in a burst.

He drops his chin back into his chest, and clicks the broadcasting button back on. "Warrant Officer Mills, this is Sergeant Winchester – I copy. Do you have my location? Over."

"Yeah, I've gotcha. The hell are you doing in Arizona? Over."

Dean sighs. "It's a long story, ma'am. Are we really doing small-talk right now? Over."

The radio crackles. "Just trying to lighten the mood, sergeant. So sue me. I take it you're calling yourself in to get back to base? Over."

"Base, or – wherever. Is the rest of the task force still in the field?" Dean asks. "Over."

"Nuh-uh. Transport came for 'em about a week or so ago, and I'm afraid they left without you. Far as they knew, you were good as dead. I'm tracking you now, should be with you within twenty-four hours," Mills says, and she gives a short laugh. "You're lucky I'm still in orbit, sergeant. I should've been back when the rest of your squad returned, only I got sent back to check satellites. You would've been boned if that one satellite over Portugal hadn't broken down. Over."

"I'll name my first-born That One Satellite Over Portugal," Dean says tiredly. "Sorry, ma'am – what's the protocol for getting picked up out of the middle of nowhere? Over."

"I'll let you know when I get closer. First off, though, do you know of any enemy positions near your location? Over."

Dean hesitates. "I'm in one." He cringes and waits, before he remembers: "Sorry - over." He releases his broadcasting button again.

For a while there is just radio crackle. Then: "Okay, that's a new one. Fine. Just… tell 'em not to attack me when I get there. You've got safe conduct, right? Over."

"Yes, ma'am. Over."

"Cool. And the, uh…" she pauses. "The Android. Is he with you? Over."

Dean swallows. "Yes, ma'am. But not functional. Over."

There is a sigh from the other end. "Sergeant, I – I'm sorry. I mean – Sam told me to watch out for you – and for, you know – your… assignment, so. I'm sorry. Over."

Dean doesn't know what to say to that. "Yeah." He sits quietly for a second and wonders where he's meant to go with this conversation. "Thanks. Over."

"Okay. I'll see you in a couple hours, then, sergeant. Over."

"Roger that – over and out." Dean clicks off and sits for another few seconds in the dark, with the radio cupped in his hands. He presses his lips tight together, breathing deeply through his nose, and tries to push past the feeling that now that he's contacted his own people in order to get home, he's never been farther from it. He swallows hard and rubs one hand roughly over his face, and then jerks to his feet to walk out of his room.

As soon as he pushes out through the front door, he finds himself face to face with Eve. She tilts her face up serenely towards him, eyebrows raised.

"Can I help you?" she challenges sweetly.

Dean heaves a long sigh and digs both hands deep into the pockets of his combat pants. "Hi," he says, voice tired with defeat. "Sorry – I was just—"

"Going back through your confiscated equipment," Eve finishes for him. "Yes, I understand what you were doing. You made contact with your people – against my orders, but what's done can't be undone. No - my concern now is whether you told your trigger-happy space chauffeurs about my settlement."

Dean tries to step around her, but she sidesteps neatly to stop him. Her expression doesn't change; her eyes are cold, and her mouth is soft with a hard smile that demands an explanation.

"Yeah, okay, I told them about you," Dean admits in a low, shamefaced grumble. "I'm sorry – I had to. There's no other way they could find me. But rest assured that they're not coming to hunt you down or blow you up or… or anything like that." He waves a hand ambiguously in the air between them before he lets that hand fall limply back to his side. "Okay? It's fine. They're gonna pick me up, and then they're gonna take me back. End of."

Dean's eyes flicker from his feet to Eve's face and away again – he'll confess to being more than a little intimidated by Eve, in spite of her being a whole foot shorter than he is. She makes no move to let him pass.

"No harm comes to you or yours," Dean goes on, speaking more quietly now. He looks up to meet Eve's eyes. "I promise."

Eve gazes at him with unflinching solemnity. "I'll hold you to that," she says softly. "Not, mind you, out of any faith in your personal integrity – but because I understand that you value your freedom the same as we value ours." With her eyes never leaving him, she steps neatly to one side to let him pass. "I just pray you remember what the little had you felt like before you gave up on it."

Even though his path to leave is now clear, several seconds pass in which Dean can't find the will to move away. He just stares at Eve, his shoulders heavy as though piled high with all his failings and uncertainties, and for all her unsettling calm and icy patience, she has a certain reassuring steadiness, comforting in the same abstract, unfriendly way as a marble column.

Her parting words are these: "And, Dean – do ensure you remember that you did give up on it." She touches his elbow, and her fingertips are cold. "Your life is, always, no more than the sum of the decisions you did not make."

"Decisions I didn't make," Dean mutters, and he drops his eyes to the grime-coated floor where it sticks to the underside of his boots. "Got it. Thanks for the pep talk." He flashes Eve a tight-lipped smile swinging closer to a grimace than a grin – a dim thing that lasts no longer than a fork of lightning before he's back to darkness – and he jerks away past her and out the door.

  


A little after fifteen-hundred-hours the next day, Dean's ship lands outside Eve's establishment, kicking up a small sandstorm of dust as it touches down, engines roaring loud enough that the sound rattles through every building as though it could tear them all down. It's not the same ship he came on – this one is smaller, since, as Warrant Officer Mills said, it's designed for satellite maintenance, not transport – and it's a little bug-eyed, the cockpit bulging up like it's been startled.

Dean stands on the rickety front porch of the town hall, his pack at one side, a heavy burlap sack stuffed full of useless old metal and plastic at the other side, and he watches the engines power down to stand-by, the landing lights flicker off, and then slowly the metal staircase unfolds down to touch the ground. As he waits, he tugs the collar of his old combat suit away from his neck; the material is itchy, and he feels unused to the chafe of it against his skin. He feels like he's been wearing civilian jeans and t-shirts for a hundred years.

Finally, once the ship has settled down to half-power, a small air-locked metal door pops open, and a small, slight woman with dark hair climbs down the stairs. Her navy flight suit glints in the harsh light as she strides towards them, but then she halts abruptly several hundred yards from the first house in the settlement, and she lifts her hands clear above her head to surrender. Dean glances at the houses nearest to her and sees Jesse Turner, one of Lilith's kids, pointing a rifle at her, with two younger kids beside him holding pistols trained at her chest. In another house, a little further away, is an older woman, also equipped with a rifle. It's no surprise Mills doesn't want to come any closer.

"Hey, Winchester," she yells, spotting him on the porch, and she nods her head in the direction of the ship. "You coming or what?"

For a second, the thought of bailing pops into Dean's head. He could just walk back inside, stay here with the rebels forever. He could give them intel into military operations, both for the Allies and for the opposing forces. Sure, he'd be a traitor, but he wouldn't have to go and face a court-martialling for desertion.

He takes a deep breath and thinks of Sam. He walks down the porch steps with his bags.

The space between him and Warrant Officer Mills seems infinite, with her silhouette against the yellow grass never growing any larger or seeming any closer, as Dean crosses the open field. His pack weighs heavy on one shoulder, and the weight of the sack is too great, and the shape of it too unwieldy, to be carried far, so progress is slow.

"Dean, wait!" someone grunts from somewhere behind him, near the main road, and when Dean turns to identify it, he finds Benny jogging towards him with one hand clapped atop his head to keep his flat-cap steady. "Wait just a goddamned second—"

Despite being more than a little confused, Dean waits for him. He wasn't expecting any emotional farewells, even from Benny, who he'd already said goodbye to at lunch with a quick hug and awkward exchange of muttered, thanks man yeah you too see you around maybe one day, before they stoically went their separate ways. However, when Benny eventually reaches him, he discovers that Benny isn't there to say goodbye again; instead he reaches across and yanks the burlap sack out of Dean's free hand.

"Fuckin' Christ, man, I ain't gonna let you drag his body through the fuckin' dirt all the way home," he snaps, even though he didn't know Cas that well, and with a grunt, he hauls the sack up into his arms.

Benny raises his eyebrows at Dean, then, like a challenge, as though to say, well, then? Are we going? and Dean is hit out of nowhere with a gratitude so intense that it burns hot tears in the back of his eyes, because he'd been trying not to think about the fact that Cas was in that sack, or that Dean was too weak and too heavily burdened to be able to carry Cas home, just like he'd been too weak and too burdened to carry Cas to the ocean, and Benny never even liked Cas all that much, but he liked Dean, and Dean—

Dean swallows thickly and stares down at his feet. He tries for a thank you but his throat swells up so tight that he can't get words out, so he just nods, and together they continue out towards the ship.

Mills doesn't come any closer to meet them, but as soon as Benny is close enough, she reaches out and takes the sack from his hands. "Thanks," she tells him, but she smile she flashes at him is quick and wary, and she takes three steps back away from him as soon as the sack has changed hands. "You ready, Winchester?"

Dean nods curtly. As she turns to lead the way back to the ship, Dean twists briefly to give Benny the best smile he can offer, which he can feel turning his mouth more like a grimace than anything else, but it's all he's got. He heads after Warrant Officer Mills, and she stands back to let him climb the steps up first with a chirpy, "After you, soldier!"

Once inside, he dumps his pack on the floor and has a quick look around. The ship is only divided into two parts; at the front, the cockpit, and where he stands now, which is a tiny cargo bay, with lockers and thick straps that attach heavy equipment securely to the walls during take-off and landing. While he waits for Mills to climb the stairs and join him, he lugs his pack into one of the lockers and shuts it tight.

Of course, for just a moment, he forgets what she is carrying, and so when she emerges into the cargo bay, he has to look quickly back towards his locker as though he's having some trouble getting it closed, and keeps looking determinedly at it and nowhere else while he listens to Mills strapping the sack to the wall. During this, he takes his opportunity.

"Uh, ma'am – I was just wondering," he starts uncertainly. "Can I ask you a favour?"

There is the harsh, hissing sound of Mills snapping a strap tight. "Sure thing," she says, and then there is the snap of the next one.

Dean pauses, and his mouth twists a little hesitantly as he tries to figure out the best way to phrase this, but in the end realises that there is no easy way to try this, so he just says, "Can we swing by the ocean for a second?"

Mills laughs. "The ocean? For a second?" She looks at him over her shoulder, eyebrows raised incredulously. "No."

Dean sighs and his shoulders slump. "Ma'am—"

"And now let me tell you why," she cuts across him, and hiss-snaps shut another strap on the wall. Her voice takes on a business-like tone. "First of all, I'm not sure if you know this, but the nearest ocean is in Mexican territory. Hell, we're technically in Mexican territory right now – I only came this far south on my own to retrieve a missing soldier, and just in case you weren't aware, that was a risky as hell move on my part."

She seals the last strap to the wall, dusts her hands off on the pants of her flight suit, and then moves through towards the cockpit with her chin tilted over her shoulder so that she can still talk to Dean, and in that way indicate that he should follow. He trails after her.

"Second of all," she goes on, and she drops down into the pilot's seat, "I'm pretty sure you wouldn't dare ask me to take you there just as a little vacation. I'm an idiot, Winchester – you want to throw that robot in the sea, and I can't let you do that."

And with that, she flicks a switch that has the metal stairs rattling back up into the ship's underbelly, and the door slams shut with a clang that reverberates through the cockpit. There's a faint sucking sensation as the air-locks seals tight, and Dean's ears pop, but he barely notices.

He stands in the doorway to the cockpit, just behind her shoulder as she works, and he stares at her. "Please," he says, and he tries to be as calm and reasonable as possible, but the image of Benny lifting that burlap sack inside his head - letting it hang easily between his arms like the perfect stereotypical image of the limp body in the arms of the strongman – and that image loops and loops in infinite detail, and his voice cracks. "Officer Mills, all he wanted was to see the ocean, he—"

Mills looks over her shoulder at him sharply, and there is sympathy in her somewhere, but her face is unforgiving. "All I wanted was to flight charter planes for tourists in rural Minnesota while I built the cottage of my dreams with my husband. Did I get it? No. Buck up and quit whining." She returns her gaze to her equipment and begins flicking switches, pressing buttons, flipping levers, to prepare for flight. "Regardless of however you felt about it – or him, or whatever - that back there is Allied military equipment and you can bet your bottom dollar the enemy will want get hold of it and use it against us. I think you've got this idea of some dramatic gesture as the end to a dramatic affair that, frankly, never should've even happened, and to be quite honest, I think it's a little ridiculous." She glances across at him again, one hand frozen on the throttle, and her expression softens slightly. "You do know he can fixed, right?"

Dean sits heavily in the seat beside her and turns away to look out of the window. "I don't want him to be fixed," he mutters. He looks slowly over the landscape that in the past few days he had grown so accustomed to – the rustling expanse of scrub grass and hard dirt, the yellow Mexican poppies scattered in an uneven bed near the base of the prickly mesquite trees, the rocky sweep up to the bluffs standing stark and red against the horizon. The land has Cas' fingerprints all over it. "If they fix him," he says quietly, "they'll fix everything that was wrong with him. And that means that if he does come back to me, he'll be – he'll the same as the rest of them." He sets his jaw squarely, narrows his eyes out at the bluffs and the sandstone and the dry-leaved trees. "I'd rather never see him again."

"Well, that's tough shit, because you're not dumping him in the ocean," Mills says, her voice loud and bratty, and she doesn't even look Dean's way as she pumps the ship into lift-off. The engines rumble louder and louder still, until at last they lift-off, the ground dropping away beneath them as they slowly climb higher. "Do you have any idea how much the Android Angeles cost to build?"

"I don't care," Dean says. "I'll smash him to fucking pieces myself, then."

"You will do no such thing, sergeant," Mills snaps, and she glares at him. "Do I have to use my mom voice on you right now? 'Cause I'll do it, don't think I won't."

Dean squirms a little in his seat. "Not necessary, ma'am."

"Then be quiet and buckle up," she tells him.

Dean lets out another long, slow breath, and he tilts sideways to press his forehead against the wall. "What does it even matter if I destroy some cyborg, anyway?" he mumbles. "I'm already gonna get court-martialled."

Mills sighs theatrically, as though she's explained something a thousand times and can't grasp why Dean still can't it. "You're not gonna get court-martialled as long as you tell the story right," she says.

Dean frowns, and he looks across at her. "What do you mean? I'm a deserter. I—"

"No, you're not. You came back. Deserters don't just come back – they get dragged back," she says with deliberate emphasis. "No-one back at base knows where you've been for the past three weeks or what you were doing in that time. If you do it right, the truth will be whatever the hell you tell them when they ask you, so listen here." She glances pointedly at him. "Are you listening to me?"

"I'm listening."

"Good." She turns back to her controls and coaxes the engine towards full throttle. "Now here's what you're gonna say."

  


"The Android ran, and I went after it," Dean says.

The senior officers stare back at him from the far side of the conference table, each of them wearing expressions that, thankfully, aren't sceptical, but just confused. Major Moseley folds her hands, one over the other, atop the table; Captain Turner props his chin lazily atop his clenched fist, elbow balanced on his knee; Captain Singer slouches back in his chair and regards Dean with the narrowed eyes of a man who has heard a lot of bullshit and is ready to call it out at a moment's notice.

"It was my assignment so when it hacked off its own arm and ran, I felt responsible. I wanted to bring it back," Dean continues.

Major Moseley arches her eyebrows, and her eyes flit over him as though criticising him. "Single-handedly?"

"My brother, Doctor Winchester, was meant to be my back-up. We were gonna flank him, catch him together, and bring him back to base. I just didn't realise that the Android had beaten Sam unconscious, so when I thought I was chasing it towards re-capture, I was just… chasing it further out." Dean's voice is toneless, obediently reciting what he has been told to say. "I radio-ed it in to the squad for help but it seems they'd already moved and I couldn't find them again. All I knew for sure was that I couldn't let the Android get into enemy territory, so I went after him as long as I had to. He – it – almost made it to Mexico before I caught it."

Captain Turner huffs out his breath and idly flips the page of the report that Warrant Officer Mills handed in of the pick-up procedure and the encounter with the enemy rebels. "It ran out of fuel, is that correct?"

"That's correct, sir."

"Now, I've got it in my notes here from the expedition that your first sergeant, Sergeant Henriksen, wrote in that you…" the index finger of Captain Turner's free hand trails carefully down the page in search of the right section, "here we go – that you formed some kind of connection with your Android." His eyes flash up to Dean's face and studies him for any kind of emotional response. "What do you have to say about that?"

Dean breathes in. He swallows. He breathes out. "I didn't."

Major Moseley is watching him carefully.

"I did, for a while, try to treat the Android as I would treat a person," Dean says. "I thought that this would be a good practice to get into, in case of enemy spies observing our interactions with them who might realise that we treated them like equipment." He stares down at the surface of the conference table, unable to face the their hard looks, their faces, lined with discipline, and the turn of their mouths wary of every word he says like they already know it's bullshit. "I made a mistake. I shouldn't have put that kind of trust, for any period of time, in something that was essentially just… technology." He lifts his head at last, dragging his gaze slowly with him, and looks between them with an expression that he knows is as dull and empty and everything he's said so far, because here is the only truth. "And at the end of the day, he was only ever a machine."

  


Dean falls into an aching kind of stagnancy that goes on and on.

After his meeting with the company's senior officers, he is cleared of all charges and allowed to return to duty without so much as a court-martial for his trouble. There are rumours of a medal, in fact – staging a two-hundred-mile pursuit of a broken, aggressive, and potentially-deranged robot just to keep the technology out of enemy hands is, Major Moseley tells him, nothing short of heroic. Even if it is just a rumour, Dean responds with tight smiles and assurances that he doesn't think anything like that is necessary, that he was just doing his duty, that he's pretty sure anyone in a similar position would've done the same. He's tired, he tells them – with a hollow grin and some empty quip about how running through the desert for three weeks will do that to you – and, with all due respect, would just like to be left alone to forget about the whole ordeal. Thankfully, they grant him that much.

He is taken off suspension and allowed to return to work as soon as he feels fit, and Dean feels a little lost for it. He doesn't think that he can face seeing anyone from that squad, and yet keeping away from them leaves him idle with nothing to do except replay everything that's happened since last he saw them. After first being dismissed from his hearing, Dean finds himself standing in the hallway outside Major Singer's office for the fifteen minutes, with no idea of where to go or what to do with himself.

He's been advised to report to the medical bay, in order to have his injuries catalogued and treated, if necessary – he's still suffering the effects of dehydration, fatigue, a twisted ankle, and more blisters than can be counted on two hands – but he knows that there, he'll see Sam. He's never actively avoided seeing his brother before, but the thought of Sam checking him over for injuries, and the two of them stoically evading the topic of what they both know is the greatest injury, is more than he can bear. Still, he has nowhere else to go, so eventually he bucks himself up and goes.

In some ways, it's not as bad as he had anticipated, and in some ways, it's worse. Sam isn't there; he gets looked over by one of the junior nurses, a pretty dark-haired girl with careful hands, called Tessa, who asks him to rate the pain, here and here and here, and he gives it a six and is given a little plastic cup of water to drink. Later, however, when he's on his way out, with no more than a bandage on his ankle and a warning to take it easy and drink plenty, he catches sight of a cluster of people down at the far end of the corridor – Sam, tall and solid, bent at the shoulders to speak to Charlie, who clutches at her left arm, which has some unseen injury from which blood is dripping onto the floor, and Cassie, with arms full of all Charlie's abandoned equipment.

Dean stalls in the middle of the hallway, gripped by the oddest urge to run so that he isn't seen, and although he doesn't go that far, he makes no move to draw attention to himself, either. At last, Charlie spots him, and with a loud squawk like a parrot being strangled, she takes off running down the hall towards him – Dean holds his ground, locks his knees – and she throws her arms around him with little regard for the blood running all down her forearm.

The words that she babbles at him are some borderline-incoherent variants of oh my god I thought you were never coming back holy cow, and she bounces back on her toes, absolutely beaming, and it's with an effort like pulling a car out of quicksand that he smiles back. Sam and Cassie approach more slowly, and Dean doesn't look at them, doesn't look at Sam. He asks Charlie what happened to her arm, and what happened after he left – he doesn't let her ask what happened to him, because he doesn't know what stories Sam has been telling that he'll need to line up his own stories with – and he smiles thinly over her shoulder at Cassie as well, and he doesn't look at Sam.

Charlie is still bleeding, though, after slicing her arm open during, ironically enough, a first-aid session, and Cassie and Sam are still in the middle of accompanying her to the medical centre to be stitched up, so Dean offers to leave them to it, but before he can leave, Sam's hand catches his sleeve.

"Guys, you go on in, I'll be there in a second," Sam says to the others, and Dean watches them nod and head in, rather than looking at Sam. Then they're gone, though, and there are only so many places he can stare that aren't his brother.

For several seconds, neither of them speak. Sam's fingers are still curled loosely into the sleeve of Dean's shirt.

"Dean," Sam says.

Slowly, with his jaw set into hard apathy, Dean lifts his eyes to meet Sam's, and the expression that he finds waiting for him is worse than he imagined. His face is heavy and tired, as though just seeing Dean back again when he should have been on some last-hope shoreline with salt on his skin has ripped from Sam all and any hope that happy endings were something that happened to real people. His brow crumples up, the way it used to when he was a kid learning that things don't always go the way you want them to, and there is no other way to describe the look in his eyes except heart-broken, and there is something hot and angry stinging at the back of Dean's eyes at the sight of it.

"What?" he says, trying to speak churlishly, as though he no longer cares about any of it, but somehow that fails and his voice comes out low and flat with defeat. "I came back."

Sam hesitates. His hand fidgets on Dean's arm. "Did… did he—?"

"Yeah." Dean shrugs, the wild jerk of his shoulders too exaggeratedly careless that the gesture is a little out of control, almost painful. "I mean – no. He didn't – he—" Dean looks at the floor, and swallows hard. "Sammy, I couldn't—"

Sam doesn't answer, but Dean can feel his eyes on him. He can feel the weight of Sam's sympathy sitting heavy on the top of his spine, and he hates it, because when Sam looks at him his gaze is clear and honest, and honesty is something that Dean has been avoiding for the past few days. He wants to get as far away from the truth as possible.

Sam's hand tugs slightly on Dean's sleeve and his other hand comes up towards Dean's shoulder, but before Sam can pull him in for the hug that will crush him hard enough into Dean's chest that, broad as Sam is, Dean could almost get his arms all the way around him, Dean pulls away, out of reach, and he shakes Sam's hands free of his clothes.

"I'm okay," he says, taking three short steps backwards away from Sam, who continues to watch him dejectedly as though expecting him to break down at any minute. The words come again, involuntarily – "I'm okay" – and as Dean's mouth stretches into a tight and unwilling smile, he wonders who he's trying to reassure. He waves a dismissive hand in the direction of the medical centre as he wanders backwards past the door. "You should go in to Cassie and Charlie now," he tells Sam, with a vigorous nod. "I'll see you later. After all, I'm not going anywhere, right?" He laughs, and the sound of it is hard in his throat like the rattle of a broken toy. He doesn't wait any longer; he turns, and, rubbing a hand roughly over his mouth, he walks away.

Sam doesn't say he's sorry, at that point or at any other, and for that, Dean is grateful.

They get back to work and back to idiotic conversations at the dinner table and back to regular life as previously scheduled, way back before Dean got called into Captain Turner's office to talk about a regime change. Since the squad got back from Colorado, the Androids have disappeared. Dean doesn't know if they've been taken back to Niehammer's labs or if they're just powered down in a cupboard somewhere waiting until the next time they're needed, like a row of coma patients hooked up to life support and waiting for the word that they're ready to wake up.

In spite of all their rules about secrecy, at one breakfast-time Charlie accidentally blurts out the word 'Android' in front of Ava Wilson - and thank God she's the only one at the table who wasn't already in the know, and she's trustworthy – but it brings up a whole conversation in awed whispers about what thatmeans, how that works, and like are they basically real people except metal or is it totally obvious that they're machines the whole time? Charlie opens and closes her mouth a couple of times before dismissing all questions with one tentative, over-reaching statement: "It's… well, it's complicated."

Dean impales a potato wedge on his fork.

He goes to the gym, and he goes to the ranges, mindlessly snapping out round after round at the black-outlined figurines that pop up at ten and twenty-five and one-hundred, with no thought in his head as to whether the silhouette he's gunning down is human or just something that looks like it, and he goes to the observation deck to watch the blue earth spinning.

He doesn't press his hands up against the glass. There's no use; it wouldn't bring him any closer. He breathes in, and he breathes out, and still the earth is spinning.

  


Functions test. Left hand – fingers: curl, grab, release. Right hand. Elbows, lock and bend. Twist at the waist. Touch toes: one, two, three. Bend knees and straighten. Lift and lower – left foot; right foot. Inhale – hold. Voice.

Voice.

The Android is silent.

Doctor Niehammer looks up from her clipboard. She clears her throat and speaks directly into the microphone. "Voice."

The Android breathes out, in again, out. Regular breathing is not a mechanism that Naomi had asked it to test, and she frowns over the rims of her glasses as she looks between the Android and her clipboard. This particular product had already malfunctioned once and been brought in for major repairs, and if its behaviour now is any indication, some of its faults may not have been entirely ironed out. She snaps the lid back onto her pen, clicks it sharply down under the clipboard's metal clip, tucks the board with all her paperwork under her arm for a moment; with that free hand she holds the slim microphone stand that elevates from her desktop computer, and, moving closer to it, she repeats, "Voice."

Inhale – and hold, the chest drawn tight, as is correct protocol. The Android opens its mouth. "Beta-testing Android Angeles prototype C. Unit 5284-C-S-T-L-02. Database accessible. Ready for deployment."

A small smile curves Naomi's mouth. Clearly any error present in the Android's ability to follow instructions has been corrected by its own internal regulating system. She takes her clipboard from underneath her arm and looks back down towards the small lines of checks and safety procedures.

Blue eyes open, dimly, and then focus.

Exhale.


	7. Chapter 7

Life goes on as normal: training sessions, and tactical lessons, and war scenarios in the simulation centre, ad nauseum, and without any discernible end to the pattern. They're out of the sync with the rest of their original company, who are now on their way out back to the Earth's surface – heading somewhere in the south Pacific, according to Garth – and since protocol states that all soldiers returning from the field need a minimum of a week to recover before they are sent back out, the Blue October task force squad are confined to the base until further notice.

It isn't even the base where they're usually stationed - at least there they would have their own barracks and their own things in their lockers, and ways to entertain themselves in the spare hours, but this is only a small go-between base, mid-way between the main base, some ninety miles out of orbit, and the Earth. There's no entertainment deck, here; it's barely even large enough to qualify for a gymnasium. The only answer, therefore, is to keep busy with training while they wait for the rest of their company to come back in so that they can all return to the main base.

They work on their physical strength and endurance; they work on their emergency flight training; they work on first-aid and field tactics and survival skills; in spite of being acutely aware of the fact that this squad was only a temporary set-up, and that soon things will go back to normal, with regular rank hierarchies and platoon structure, they put themselves through simulation after simulation of potential war-zones. To keep them sharp and, theoretically, in touch with their duties, they are sent out into simulated scenarios that the designers believe might be similar to the real-life scenario in which the rest of their company would find themselves.

They are just pushing tiredly through the third day of a reconnaissance mission supposedly based somewhere in northern Indonesia when all the lights abruptly go out. At first, it just seems like the exercise is being cut short, but then the lights don't come back on, and Jo just has time to say, "Well, at least the mosquitoes have gone," before dim red lights flicker on along the base of the training room's walls and in evenly-spaced strips on the ceiling, casting the room and the squad into an eerie red light.

All the squad freeze, looking around blankly at their surroundings as they try to work out what's going on, and then a siren starts up, a wailing that rises and falls, before a voice addresses them through loudspeakers mounted in the corners of the room: "Amber alert – this is an amber alert – armed and potentially dangerous. Calling all present rifle companies of the 176 Infantries' to report to the main deck's parade square for further briefing. Repeat – this is an amber alert – armed and…"

"The hell's an amber alert?" Dean asks.

"Escaped POW," Kevin says distractedly as he tilts his head right back to observe the new lighting, and when he looks back to the others, he finds them staring at him. "What?" he says, defensive. "None of you've ever read the on-board protocol manuals?"

"No," Gordon mutters. "Can't say I have."

"But this ship doesn't carry any prisoners," Sam says in surprise.

Charlie glances between them. "I don't know, I've heard that it sometimes gets used if—"

The double doors at the far end of the room hiss open and middle-aged woman in dark glasses, one First Lieutenant Barnes, steps through. "Show's over, folks," she calls, and she raps on the doorjamb with a fist. "I need you all to check your weapons back in, pronto."

They all take a moment to snap the safety back onto their weapons, and as they file back into the simulation centre's lobby, Dean turns to Charlie and asks, "If what?"

Charlie whispers back, "If someone goes postal, I think."

Dean frowns. "Huh."

Once Lieutenant Barnes has helped them to check their weapons back in with the armoury assistant, Victor moves towards the exit, but is stopped by Barnes shouting, "Whoa now, where do you think you're going?"

Victor blinks at her, and then glances back towards the others. "Respectfully, ma'am, I was going to take my squad to report to the parade square."

"No, you're not," she replies bluntly, and she taps in the electronic code to lock the armoury with short, decisive gestures. "I got a call saying to keep you guys on temporary lock-down until this amber alerts is settled."

Victor balks. "What? What do you mean? Why?"

She waves a dismissive hand. "Something about intelligence on some particular stolen technology, I don't know. They just said that I'm not allowed to let you join the pursuit." She eyes them, one eyebrow arched. "Best get comfortable."

Victor stares at her for a second as though seeking some way to argue, before at last he gives a sigh. "Okay," he says resignedly, "well, what are we meant to do until then?"

As she begins to answer, Sam tilts across towards Dean and says quietly, "That sound like something to do with the Androids to you?"

Dean doesn't look at him. "No."

"I'm just saying—"

"Well, don't," Dean interrupts.

"—that if any Android was gonna stage an escape, I think I know who—"

Dean looks sharply at him. "Sam, I'm only gonna say this once. Shut the fuck up."

Sam huffs his breath out moodily, but he holds his hands up in surrender and says no more. Dean turns his back on him and is moving to ask Jo what she thinks of the whole situation when there comes a shrill tone from a small screen behind the simulation centre's main desk.

Lieutenant Barnes apologetically cuts herself off from conversation with Bela and Victor to go and answer it. She taps a finger to one corner of the screen – and then, a moment later, she reaches across to pick up the earpiece sat at the top of the screen, and tucks it against her ear for some private message. She doesn't speak; she just listens. She sets the earpiece back and looks over the desk at the squad amassed lazily before her.

"Sergeant Winchester?" she calls, and Dean looks up. "You're to be escorted to Major Moseley's office immediately. You can leave your pack and your webbing here. Lance Corporal Bradbury, you take him – I want word as soon as he's arrived, and you'll be stationed to wait with the officers there until the amber alert is cleared."

Dean frowns, his mouth falling slightly open in incredulity, but he knows better than to argue. "Right away, ma'am," he says. As he gets to his feet, Sam's hand reaches up to brush across his sleeve, and Dean looks down to give Sam a look indicating that he has no idea what's going on either before he tugs the zip of his combat jacket up to his neck and follows Charlie out of the simulation centre.

"Dude, what the hell have you done now?" she asks him as soon as the automatic doors slide closed behind them, and they stride away down the hallway, which is also illuminated dimly by red strip lighting along the ceiling that throws their shadows like phantoms across the walls.

"I don't know," Dean admits.

Charlie hums under her breath at that. "Sure," she says in a teasing mockery of scepticism, and she makes a show of suspiciously narrowing her eyes at him.

"I'm sorry, Charlie – I wish I could tell you I'm the head of some world-changing rebellion, but…" Dean grimaces. "I'm really, really not."

Charlie's face falls a little, like she'd entertained some genuine hope of there being anything as exciting as that going on, but if she's disappointed, she doesn't say so. She walks ahead of him, her boots clacking decisively on the metal as she goes.

Dean was telling the truth – he doesn't know why he's been summoned – but there is a certain suspicion churning low in his stomach that all goes back to Sam's idiotic comments. He's not thinking about it. He isn't – but if there were any possibility that somehow, against all odds, Cas remembers… He exhales sharply and lifts his chin higher. He isn't thinking about it.

The hallway twists left and then opens into a vaguely hexagonal space, three of the edges of which are occupied by elevators that flash dimly blue underneath the doors as they whoosh silently by. Bela presses the button of the one nearest to them, and they wait. As they step into the elevator, Dean thinks idly that this is oddly reminiscent of a condemned man being escorted to prison.

Major Moseley's office is up two floors and along the long hall of lecture theatres and conference rooms, and when they reach it, they find that ordinary lights inside are still functioning, and so it shines through the pane of fogged glass in a gentle yellow square, and it cuts Moseley into soft silhouettes as she speaks, inaudibly, to some other officers amassed in her room. Dean hesitates, and then knocks three times.

The silhouettes become still. A moment passes, and then one smaller shadows moves towards the door and calls out, "Sergeant Winchester? Come in."

With one hand paused on the door-handle, Dean glances back at Charlie. "I'll see you later, I guess," he says, and he pushes into the office.

"Winchester," Major Moseley greets as he comes in. "Shut the door behind you, please."

Dean does as he's told. Once the door is shut, he comes to attention and salutes, only to have not a single officer respond to him, and after several awkward seconds standing frozen in that position, he slowly lowers his hand.

Major Moseley stands just in front of him, leaning against her desk; in two old armchairs sit Captain Turner and Major Singer, and on the far side of the office, sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair with her legs neatly crossed at the ankle, is Doctor Niehammer. She watches him carefully, her mouth twisted in a faint smile as warm as the hard electric light above them. There is one more wooden chair left in front of Moseley's desk, empty.

"Take a seat, sergeant," Captain Turner says.

Dean crosses the room and sits down.

Major Moseley gives him a fleeting smile before she rounds the edge of her desk to sit in her own seat. "There's nothing to worry about, Dean. We just have a couple questions for you."

"Yes, ma'am," Dean replies. He laces his fingers together where his hands hang between his knees, to stop him clenching his fists. "Whatever I can do to help, I will."

Doctor Niehammer gets right to the point. "You recovered the Android prototype 5284-C-S-T-L, didn't you?"

Dean looks over at her, startled. Having never spoken to her before, he didn't expect her to be so blunt, and he didn't expect the ice-cold clipped professionalism in her tone either, which treats him as though he's no more human than the Androids were – just a tool to be used and then disposed of once he's outlived his usefulness. "Uh," he says. "Yeah." He swallows and looks towards Major Moseley. "I'm sorry, what's this about?"

He breathes in, holds it so that he won't react the way they want him to when they say it—

"One of the Androids has escaped from our on-board testing facility," Naomi says.

Dean exhales.

His heart is beating like the aggressive backwards thud of a machine-gun tripod into the dirt as it spits out bullets, hard and fast.

"Seriously?" he asks, his voice two parts incredulous to one part sceptical. "Why? What would it want?"

Naomi's smile spreads wider, showing teeth. "That's something on which we thought you might be able to enlighten us."

Dean lets out a long breath, puffs his cheeks out as he puts on a show of deep thought. "I don't know what you want me to say – I'm not exactly the resident expert on basket-case robot runaways, here," he says, and even as the words fall from his mouth, he realises that it's exactly what he is.

The officers are watching him attentively.

"Oh." Dean opens his mouth, hesitates. "Is it, uh – is it the same Android, or—?"

"It was undergoing repairs," Naomi says. "It was still incomplete – we'd restored its original database settings and were just in the process of fitting a new arm but, conveniently enough, we hadn't yet got around to the re-insertion of its tracking chip before it decided it had somewhere to be."

There is a sensation of dread that sinks gradually through Dean's chest to his stomach, like the slow drip of blood down a glass pane. "What happened?"

"Confidential information," Major Singer starts, but Naomi cuts over him.

"It waited," she says, and her eyes are hard, unblinking, on Dean's face. "It assaulted two security guards – left them badly injured – and kindly relieved one of them of both his weapon and his key-card. I'm telling you this because I feel it's essential that you understand that the Android is armed and violent."

Dean looks between them. "No, I get that," he says. "Armed and violent. Okay. Well, uh… did he – I don't know, say anything?"

Captain Turner and Major Singer exchange a look. Dean follows the gesture with his eyes, and when he looks back to Doctor Niehammer, he finds her smiling again – except this time, there's some real depth to it, although he wouldn't call it warmth so much as he would glee.

"Why?" Naomi asks gently, and she leans forwards in her seat, arms folded over her knee. "Would you have expected him to?"

Dean can't figure out what it is about Naomi in that moment which gives him the distinct impression that his death certificate has just been definitively stamped, and it's not until he replies, "No, I just thought that maybe he might've—" that he realises he had forgotten to refer to Cas as it, and that Naomi had echoed his accidental pronoun use. They're all watching him closely. Dean swallows reflexively. "I don't know. Said something."

"Did the Android say anything to you before it ran last time?" Major Moseley asks.

Dean is acutely aware that he can't remember the details of the story he gave them when he got brought in, and that the report written up with that same story is currently open on Missouri's desk. He takes a leap of faith – he rolls his eyes and says, "Yeah, it told me it was going to Vegas, say it'd bring me back his winnings and we could split it fifty-fifty."

"Cut the sarcasm, Winchester," Captain Singer snaps.

"It didn't say anything," Dean says. "It just… ran. I don't think it meant for any of us even to realise it was gone until the morning."

"I see." Major Moseley glances down at the report on her desk, but if there's any ill correlation between what Dean has said and what is written there, she doesn't mention it.

"As it happens, the Android did say something," Niehammer says, and then she smiles at Captain Singer, as though apologising for having previously interrupted him, "but that's confidential information."

Dean sits back in his chair, and he nods. "Sure."

"Sergeant," Major Moseley starts, her index finger skimming over Dean's original report, "when the Android last escaped, did you have any idea where he was going? And if so, is there any possibility he might try to go there again?"

Arizona. Dean realises simultaneously that if the repaired Cas prototype has any recollection of his previous life, he'll remember Arizona, and also that Dean has to lead them as far away from that conclusion as he can. Most importantly, he has to get out of here as soon as possible.

"No," he says, and he looks up to meet Major Moseley's eyes. "All due respect, ma'am, but the Android isn't sentient. It didn't try to escape because it wanted, personally, to be anywhere – all it wanted was to destroy what claim your company had over him." He glances at Doctor Niehammer. "Emotions are complicated – but power is simple. It ran as a challenge , to an authority it didn't agree with, for whatever reason." He inhales deeply, buoying himself up, and he finishes, "Ma'am, my best bet is that it doesn't want to escape. It wants to destroy you."

Doctor Niehammer's eyebrows raise. She looks sideways, down at the floor, and slowly her eyes flicker up to the office door. For the first time, Dean sees something real in her expression, something more than the empty façade of professional benevolence that she projects – and he sees fear. She's created something smarter and more powerful that she is, and she has no control over it, and she's frightened.

Dean sits up straight. "Is there anything else I can help with, officers?" he asks, his voice sweetly patient like he wants nothing more than to help them track down an allegedly psychotic, revenge-driven cyborg.

Major Moseley drums the tip of her pen against her desk-top, and she glances between the others. "Does anyone else have anything further they'd like to ask or bring to Sergeant Winchester's attention?"

Major Singer grunts; Captain Turner shakes his head and says, "No, ma'am, I'm good." Doctor Niehammer doesn't say anything.

"That'll be all, then, sergeant," Major Moseley says, giving Dean a quick smile, and she nods towards the door. "Thank you for your assistance. We'll be in touch if we need anything else."

"Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry I couldn't be any more helpful," Dean replies, in a tone that he hopes is appropriately sombre, and he gets up to leave. He salutes once more before he goes – at least this time, he gets a response from Moseley and Singer – and then he pulls the door open and heads back out into the darkened, red-lit hallway.

Outside the door, there is a security guard who nods at him, says, "Sergeant," by way of greeting, and then accompanies him further down the hallway to a small waiting room lined with plastic chairs. Charlie sits on one of the chairs, fingers tapping idly against her knee, and she looks up with interest as Dean comes in.

"So what did you do?" she asks as Dean takes a seat nearby.

He shrugs. "I dunno – don't think I did anything," he lies, and he looks around the room to see if leaving is a possibility. He needs to get to Cas before any of the other search parties do – somehow, he doesn't think that they'll have a particularly forgiving approach to hunting him down this time. To Charlie, he adds, "They just had some questions about the Androids and stuff," and hopes that she'll leave the questions at that.

The security guard who escorted Dean in here has assumed a post by the doorway, presumably to keep them from leaving; there are no other ways out of the room; there is a video-camera mounted on the far left wall. Dean doubts he can slip past the guard, and suspects as well that if he were to make a run for it, he'd probably be tackled or tasered and wind up, one way or another, in hospital.

He slouches back in his seat, defeated, and he sticks his hands deep into his pockets to wait it out, and his fingers brush foil. He glances at Charlie out of the corner of his eye – she's looking the other way, in the direction of the security guard – and so he grabs the foil packet and surreptitiously pulls it out. It's the wrapper for a chocolate bar, which in itself isn't any more interesting than the knowledge that at least if he's stuck here he has some chocolate to eat, but it also means that he forgot to unpack his rations before he left the simulation centre.

He stuffs the bar back into his pocket, digs a little deeper, and, finding nothing, he tries the pockets of his combat jacket, and that's where he finds the other snack given out in ration packs – one crunchy-nut peanut and raisin bar.

Dean glances at Charlie again and he unwraps it.

He holds his face away from it – just the smell of it could fuck this whole thing up – and between two fingers he crumbles a small portion of the bar onto the floor. Dean takes a deep breath.

"Hey, what's even in these bars?" he asks Charlie conversationally.

Charlie looks over. "Hmm?"

Dean squints at the wrapping, and he takes a deep breath that wheezes on the way in. "Oh, fuck."

"What?" Charlie frowns, and she reaches over to take the bar from his hands, and then she echoes Dean's sentiment with a mild, "Oh, holy mackerel, Batman."

"Get Sam," Dean says, and he wheezes inwards again. "Shit – oh, shit – Charlie, go get Sam."

"Oh my god, Dean! What is wrong with you? Oh, wow, this is happening – okay. Where's your epi-pen?"

Dean wheezes, louder this time. "It's in—" He figures that Charlie has never seen him go into anaphylaxis before, so he adds a rattling cough, just for good measure. "In my webbing. I left it—"

"Oh wow, oh no." Charlie gets quickly to her feet and jogs towards the security guard. "Excuse me," she addresses him, and gives him a tight smile that floats somewhere between politeness and extreme irritation. "My friend's just accidentally ingested an allergen – someone needs get Doctor Sam Winchester here, with an epi-pen – like, stat?"

"Oh, God," the security guard says, all the colour draining from his face, and he pulls a small transmitter from his pocket into which he starts urgently muttering, all the while his eyes are fixed in terror on Dean as he doubles over gasping in ever more high-pitched wheezes.

It's working better than Dean could've planned, he thinks – if either of them had ever actually seen someone having a severe allergic reaction, this could have all gone horribly wrong, but as it is, they're both taking his appalling theatrics as legitimate. Of course, Dean trusts Charlie enough to let her in on the real plan, but the fewer people who know what's really going on here, the better. As the seconds tick over into minutes with Dean shaking and gasping, and no medics show, though, Dean starts to worry – there's going to come a point when he's either going to have to admit he's faking, or literally pretend to die, and that could prove difficult.

At last, however, Sam bursts through the doorway. "Shit – I'm sorry, I got here as fast as I could," he blurts out, and in three seconds he's crossed the room, thrown off the webbing slung over one arm, and got Dean's epinephrine injector prepped in hand. Dean only has time to think, fuck, this is going to sting like a b— and then Sam stabs it hard into Dean's thigh.

"Fuck," he gasps, and Sam's eyes flash up to Dean's face, a frown pulling between his eyebrows.

"Dean, are you—?"

"Get me out of here, Sam," Dean rasps, groping blindly for Sam's arm as he clutches at his throat.

Sam clings reassuringly to his hand. "It's okay," he tells Dean, "some of the other paramedics are coming now with a stretcher and then you can—"

"I can walk!" Dean bursts out.

Sam stares at him incredulously. "Dean, what are you—?"

"It's okay, Sam, I can help if you want," Charlie offers, leaping up, and helpfully she puts an arm around Dean to help him on his feet.

Dean lurches up, with Charlie's support, and he grabs Sam's shoulder. "Sam, I can walk," he says again, slurring his words, and he deliberately wheezes, and adds, "It doesn't Hilts – hurt – that bad, I just—"

Sam's expression of concern flattens instantly into one of the most furious bitch-faces Dean has ever seen him wear, but Dean jerks one leg pseudo-uncontrollably so that he's thrown inelegantly forwards against Sam's chest – after all, no-one else has a clue what's going on, so he might as well play it up – and thankfully, Sam doesn't say another goddamned word, but slings an arm around Dean's waist as though to help him walk, and leads him out of the room.

They continue to hobble together ten or fifteen yards away down the hall, but as soon as they've rounded a corner and are out of earshot, Sam yanks away from Dean and shoves him back hard enough that he crashes into the wall.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, what the hell?" Charlie exclaims, her hands flying up defensively. "He's a little delicate at the moment, don't you thi—"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Sam rounds on him in a furious whisper. "When I got called, I thought you were gonna fucking die, you selfish piece of—"

"You were right, it's Cas," Dean cuts across him urgently.

Charlie recoils, eyes wide. "What?"

"Just – one second, Charlie, I'll explain," Dean tells her, except he doesn't get a chance to explain, because Sam has a handful of his jacket again and is pushing him back against the wall as a threat.

"No, you won't explain, because this is over right now. I don't fucking care if Cas has taught himself to tap-dance, Dean, you can't just pretend to go into goddamn anaphylactic shock," Sam hisses, and he takes a few steps away, raking a hand backwards through his hair and taking deep breaths to calm himself. "Jesus, I could kill you myself, I swear to—"

As Charlie realises what is going on – both what Dean has done, and why – her mouth falls slightly open in amazement, and she looks back and forth between them as though not sure where to start on this revelation. "Wait," she says slowly. "So – Cas?"

"He's back – he's, uh – he's escaped. And injured someone, apparently." Dean lets out a shaky breath, rubs one hand roughly over his face. "I don't know what to do, honestly. Every rifle company on board is hunting him down right now, and I'm sorry, Sam," he says, reaching out to grab a handful of Sam's combat jacket and hold him still as he paces angrily past, "I really am – I didn't mean to scare you – but Cas is somewhere on this ship trying to get back to Arizona, and he is being hunted down right now, and I have to find him before they do, and I was under lock-down and I didn't know how else to get out," he rambles, praying fervently as he speaks that Sam won't be too mad to help him.

Sam looks away down the hallway as though he's trying to summon the strength to stay mad, to refuse to help out of sheer spite. "Dean," he starts, but gets no further.

"Well, I'm with you on this," Charlie says softly, one hand touching Dean's arm. "Do not think that means I'm impressed about you lying," she adds in a raised voice, eyebrows arching as a warning, "but I can beat you up about that later. I'm with you. Sam?"

Sam could never refuse, and at last he exhales sharply in defeat. "Fine. Of course I'm gonna help – you're my brother – but – god, Dean. First things first," he says angrily. "How do you feel?"

"Like I just had sixteen espressos on the go, but otherwise fine," Dean says brightly. "Can we go?"

Sam sighs. "Jesus Christ." He jabs a finger at Dean's face. "If your blood pressure fucks up and you pass out, I will not hesitate to literally leave you unconscious on the floor. We clear?"

"Crystal," Dean says, and he grabs Sam's sleeve again to start dragging him down the length of the hall. "Now come on!"

They take off running, their footsteps a dull echo over and over in the hard, narrow space, and they head for the stairwells. The elevators won't be working, with all the ship's secondary power systems down, and so they take the stairs three steps at a time, flight after flight down towards the ship's lowest floor.

At one point, the door into the stairwell one flight down from them crashes open to allow some twenty soldiers to pour through, hurrying down the stairs with rifles drawn and helmet visors down, and Sam, Charlie, and Dean jump backwards out of sight. They stand with their backs pressed to the wall, holding their breath, until all sound of the soldiers' boots on the metal steps are gone, and then they go on – carefully, now, checking around every corner and ducking past windows into other rooms so that they won't be seen.

They move through the red-tinted gloom like flickering shadows, as fast and as silent as they can, towards the ship's cargo transportation bay – Charlie's idea. It's less populated than the military transportation bay, which is always full of workers loading, unloading, and clearing out ships, and it's further from the main parade ground where so many infantrymen are starting their man-hunt. If Cas was going to escape from the ship anywhere, Charlie's pretty sure it would be there.

As they near the wide double doors at the bottom of the stairwell, Charlie, Dean, and Sam slow down, and at last they stop in front of the doors. They look over at each other, and together they push the doors open.

Those doors open directly into the cargo transportation bay, a space that occupies most of the lower floor. Nearest the doors are lines upon lines of high metal shelves, upon which are boxes and crates of varying sizes that contain engine parts, ship maintenance material, and basic travel essentials such as rations pack and industrial-sized containers of fresh water. There are large cans of oil along the walls, and for the most part, the space is dark, illuminated only faintly by lighting strips on the ceiling high above them, which glints occasionally off the sleek body of a cargo ship. The light that pours in from the doors is cut out against the darkness in a faint square, their silhouettes stark inside that red-tinted box.

All is quiet; Dean can hear his own pulse inside his ears, a rapid drumbeat elevated by the adrenaline shot. He takes a deep breath and steps into the bay, letting the doors swing closed behind him. Sam follows.

As they tread slowly deeper into the cargo bay, Dean becomes more aware of the fact that somewhere in here, Cas is armed, and potentially violent, and that he may not even remember Dean enough to restrain from shooting him on sight, if he remembers him at all.

Doctor Niehammer had said that they'd restored Cas' original database; that might mean that all of Cas' memories have been wiped. If Cas has been restored to factory settings, then Dean doesn't know what to expect from him – but then, if he's staging an escape, he must have some recollection of his life before he shut down.

"Can you see anything?" Sam says.

"I'm high on adrenaline, Sam, I haven't got X-ray vision."

Sam huffs. "I didn't expect to have X-ray vision, I was just asking if you could—"

"I can't see anything."

"Okay. Good. Was that really so hard? That's all I wanted to know." Sam glances back over his shoulder in case they're being followed. "Well. Me neither." He faces the front again. "Are we even sure Cas is here?"

"No," Dean admits.

"I stand by this being our best bet," Charlie says. "He'll be here. I'm sure of it."  
They move stealthily, each of them turned out in a different direction – Sam scanning left, Dean the right, Charlie facing straight ahead – and they hold their breath for any sound.

"Dean," Sam whispers.

The three of them freeze at the same time. Dean looks over past Sam, and he listens. Somewhere in the distance, there are careful footsteps. Dean is more conscious than ever of his lack of a weapon; he clenches and unclenches his hands.

The footsteps rise and fall, as though pacing back and forth. The steps slow; they stop altogether. They start again, and Dean realises that Cas - if it is Cas – is lost. Cas doesn't know what to do. Cas, Dean realises, probably doesn't know anything.

"Quiet," Dean says, and as he sets off in the direction of the footsteps, he gestures to Sam and Charlie to drop back slightly. If Cas remembers anyone, it will be Dean. The last thing Dean needs is for Cas to feel threatened.

Armed and potentially violent, he reminds himself.

Ahead of them rises a shape from the shadows – the outline of an almost-human form, growing more distinct under the sparse lighting as Dean, Charlie, and Sam get closer – and all the air rushes out of Dean's lungs as though he's been punched, because he would know the slope of those shoulders anywhere.

Cas is no longer moving; he stands completely still, some twenty yards away, and half in shadow. One of his arms is bare, no more than the plastic, metal, and wiring that is usually hidden away under his synthesised skin where a new arm has replaced the old ragged amputation, and the fingers of that hand are loose at his side. In his other hand is a pistol.

Dean knows, then, that Cas is aware of their presence – knows it in the same moment he knows that Cas is waiting for them to come within accurate firing range.

"Sam," Dean starts, reaching a hand out blindly behind him for his brother, to warn him, but before he can say any more, Cas whips around, pulling his weapon up to aim, and his finger's on the trigger, and Dean doesn't even have time to process the fact that it's really Cas, that he's here and as alive as he ever would be, because Cas' mouth opens in that way he has, to take one short inhalation before he fires, and Dean is staring down the muzzle of a gun – but something changes, then, because Dean is locked into Cas' sights, but at the last possible second before the trigger is squeezed, his arms snap across to the right.

With the crack of the bullet, there's a high sound and Sam shouting, "Dean!" and Dean doesn't even have time to look around to see if Charlie's okay – he just yells, "Don't shoot!" and throws his hands up above his head in surrender. "We're unarmed – Jesus Christ, don't shoot!"

"Stay back," Cas warns, his voice rough with the threat, and his aim comes back towards Dean. His finger flexes on the trigger.

Dean risks a moment to glance backwards, fear crushing his chest like a building pressure inside his ribs, and he finds Charlie fallen back to sit inelegantly on the floor. The majority of one of her shoulder's is covered now with a bright stain of dark blood, and she breathes rapidly as though in shock as Dean helps her to apply pressure to the wound. Dean can see that it's not severe, thank God, but Dean knows from experience that a gunshot injury not being serious doesn't make it less painful. Sam looks up from his treatment of Charlie with wide eyes, and slowly Dean turns back to face Cas.

Cas looks almost as horrified as Sam does, and Dean thinks that maybe he hadn't planned to hurt anyone in his grand escape. He takes a deep breath, steadies his hand, and a muscle in jaw jumps nervously as he tenses up. The pistol is now pointing at Dean again. "Don't move – don't come any closer," Cas tells Dean firmly. "I don't want to have to hurt you, but—"

"Doesn't that go against your programming?" Dean interrupts, trying to separate Cas from his fear and confusion, like an attempt to distract a cornered animal. At the sound of his voice, Cas' hands tighten on the pistol grip like he's a split-second from firing again, and Dean jerks backwards a step away from him, lifting his hands higher, but he goes on, "Morality? You shouldn't know what that is."

Cas' arms lower infinitesimally, the muzzle of his pistol tilting distractedly downwards, and he stares at Dean over the sights. "I don't," he says, after a moment, but his voice is uncertain. "I—"

He cuts himself off. Dean can see the shift of his throat as he swallows, hard.

"What are you doing?" Dean asks, keeping his tone gentle and unthreatening.

"That's private information," Cas snaps.

"Bullshit it is." Dean raises his eyebrows at him and guesses, "You trying to escape?"

Cas stares at him. "That's—"

"Private information," Dean finishes, and he rolls his eyes. At least he knows that somewhere Cas is still the same – still a pedantic, overly-serious asshole, that is. "Okay, I get it." He glances back at Sam, who is frozen several feet behind him with his hands above his head, and who widens his eyes at Dean to silently express that he really thinks that Cas should be the main focus of his attention right now. Dean turns back, takes a deep breath, and he says, "You're going to Arizona."

Cas falters. His eyes flash nervously to Sam and back, to the ground and back towards the door and to the pistol starting to tremble in his outstretched hand – anywhere except at Dean. He doesn't answer.

"You know how to get there?" Dean asks.

"I'm taking a ship," Cas says, which isn't particularly forth-coming, nor exactly the type of response that Dean had been fishing for, but at least it's a start. His voice is quieter now, although it hasn't in any way lessened in hostility.

"That's… a pretty good start, I'll give you that much," Dean says, almost conversationally. "You know how to fly one?"

"It's in my database."

Dean hesitates. "And what about Arizona?" he tries, and he watches the uncertainty flicker over Cas' face. "That in your database, too?"

Cas swallows. "Arizona," he says slowly, "is something I need to do."

"Why?" Dean asks.

"I—" Cas stalls, and for a moment his mouth open and closes soundlessly as though the words he's trying to say simply don't exist. His brow crumples into frustration as he fights his own inability to understand, and at last the decision he comes to is to snap his pistol back up to aim, arms locked, hands tight on the metal, and from beneath gritted teeth he manages shakily, "I don't know. I don't remember."

"What do you remember?"

For several moments, Cas doesn't speak. He stands frozen, arms up with pistol extended, legs braced to fire, and he stares at Dean. He breathes.

When he does answer, Cas speaks softly, with fear, like he has no idea what the words mean but understands, if dimly, that they're the most powerful words he has: "Dean Winchester."

With those words like a knife to the gut, Dean thinks he knows now what Cas said before he escaped – and why Dean, specifically, was called in to see Major Moseley. He swallows, the sound a dry click that seems too loud, even with all the space between them. He says, "My name's Dean Winchester."

At first, Cas doesn't visibly react – his face remains carefully blank, with that crease in his brow and his mouth a hard line –and Dean thinks that maybe he knew that the whole time, until he sees the way that the pistol shifts infinitesimally in Cas' hand, tiny tremors wobbling his aim back and forth. "You."

Dean takes a step towards him.

Cas reacts – he yanks his pistol still, both hands over the pistol grip to hold it steady, bracing his feet apart for the recoil of his weapon against his body. "I said don't come any closer!"

"Or what?" Dean challenges, and he takes another step forwards. "You'll shoot me?"

"Dean," Sam whispers frantically, but he's in no position to start moving in case he threatens Cas somehow, and there's nothing he can do; Dean ignores him.

"I'm the only thing you know, the only thing you understand, Cas – you really gonna kill me?"

Cas whispers his own name, twice, like he's tasting the syllables, running the sound of it through some internal processor to see if anything can be recognised from it. "Cas," he says. "Cas."

"Unit 5284-C-S-T-L," Dean recites, his voice falling into the rolling rhythm of footsteps, getting closer. He takes one step, and then another, and then another – slowly, at first, then more steadily, to the point where they're in the shadows together. The dim white lights overhead pick out the details of Cas where they fall on the left side of his face – the crows' feet, the crinkles at the corners of his mouth – and he looks tired, and frightened, and his mouth is open, breathing fast.

"Stay back, or I'll shoot!" he yells, and he brandishes the pistol out at arm's length in one sharp pulse, although by now his hands are shaking to the point that Dean doesn't know whether Cas would be able to hit him even if he did fire. "I'll do it, I'll—"

"No, you won't," Dean says quietly, and he crosses the distance towards Cas with precise, unfaltering steps, until he's right up in Cas' space, close enough to touch, and the muzzle of Cas' loaded pistol comes to rest against his sternum.

"I'll do it," Cas says hesitantly, and his voice cracks.

Dean exhales, slow and shaky, and lets all the tension bleed out of his shoulders – if he's going to go down, it may as well be like this – and he tilts his body forwards into the pistol's muzzle until the metal digs into his skin. "No, you won't."

Pressed to Dean's heart, the pistol becomes still. Cas' hands stop shaking.

Everything is silent, then – Dean can't hear Sam behind them, and he can't see any further than Cas' outline – and just for a moment, even the faint hum of the electric lighting strips could be the shush of the seashore. Cas' eyes are fixed on the point where the pistol's metal meets the fabric of Dean's jacket, as though still trying to convince himself that he can pull the trigger.

Slowly, Cas' eyes lift to meet Dean's, and the fear in that look is staggering. "What am I?"

With the bite of the pistol still hard against Dean's chest, he lifts both hands carefully to cup Cas' jaw. "You're family."

"Dean," Cas says, and he brings his thumb down to disarm the pistol's hammer. All the strength seems to leave his arms at once, and they fall back to his sides, the pistol loose in the grip of one hand. He exhales in a long sigh, his shoulders slumping as though with exhaustion, and someone had told Dean then that his touch was the only thing holding Cas up, he could've believed it. "And I'm Cas."

It's so surreal, so incredible – Dean, and Cas, and Cas' skin under his hands, and the blue of his eyes – that a short, brittle sound breaks from Dean's mouth, something that balances between a laugh and a sob of relief. "Yeah," he says, a grin spreading across his face, and he skims the pad of his thumb over Cas' cheekbone. "Yeah, you are."

"And… Sam," Cas says slowly, and his eyes move past Dean to where Sam and Charlie must still be sitting, several yards behind them, and there's a rush of something warm and giddy all through Dean as he watches Cas' mouth turn up microscopically at the corners at the sight of them. "And – Charlie? And what else?"

"That's it, really," Dean says. "That's all that matters."

One hand falls from Cas' face, but the fingers of the other still brushing gently along the lone of his jaw, he turns halfway back towards Sam and Charlie. They're standing together now, Charlie with her combat jacket shrugged off and knotted loosely around her hips so that she can better press a stained lump of gauze to her injured shoulder; Sam has a careful hand around her waist to keep her from falling if she gets blood-loss dizzy.

Sam's eyes flicker between Cas and Dean – resting a moment on the gentle touch of Dean's hand to Cas' face – and he weakly jokes, "You're not gonna shoot me, are you?"

Cas' face crumples, his mouth and nose scrunching up with remorse. "Charlie," he says shamefacedly. "My sincerest apologies – I'm sorry, I didn't—"

"Don't sweat it, dude," she interrupts, and she holds out her injured hand towards him in a placating gesture, her other hand occupied with maintaining pressure of her injury. "It's a graze. If you'd been aiming to kill, you would've torn me in half, so – it's okay."

Cas doesn't look convinced. His gaze flashes worriedly from her face to the red stain on her hands as she clings to her own shoulder. "All the same, I'm sorry."

"Chin up, dude," she says, and pings the tip of one finger gently against his cheek. "I've had worse." She turns to grin at Dean, then, and adds, "Oh man, do you remember that time I—"

Somewhere behind them, doors crash open. There are footsteps, heavy, ringing metallic against the floor – the faint clatter of plastic rifle slings against the metal magazine housings to which they're attached – the indistinct bark of orders from an NCO – and Dean knows they're out of time.

All the colour drains from Sam's face. "Oh, shit," he whispers.

"Hide!" Charlie squeaks, glancing about wildly for anywhere they could conceal themselves with approximately thirty seconds to spare before the incoming soldiers get past the shelving units, into the bay proper, and find them.

"No," Cas says, and without so much as stepping away from the group, he snaps his pistol back up, levels it upwards at once the lighting strips, and he lets out a single shot. His aim is perfect: the lights explode in a eye-searing explosion of sparks and metal, and although the sound of gun-fire has inexorably alerted the soldiers to their presence, the lighting circuit overhead shorts out, and they are plunged into a comforting darkness into which they can disappear. In the gloom, Cas' hand finds Dean's. "Run."

As the soldiers spread out down towards the sound of the shot, Cas, Dean, Sam, and Charlie sprint the length of the ships that lie in wait in front of them, and then double back underneath the ships' noses to the far end of the bay where the main airlock lies in wait with its metal teeth locked shut.

"Second from the end," Cas urges as they run, and as a shadow in the darkness, Dean can see the outstretched point of his hand directing them.

In front of each ship is an open space of about thirty yards – just barely enough for the smaller planes to turn around onto a narrow make-shift runway towards the airlock – but the ship that Cas has in mind is even smaller than the average, barely twenty yards from tip to tail, at a guess. For its inferior stature, however, it looks fast, and Dean figures that's the main priority – to get as far away from the main Alliance military base as possible before a search-party is sent out to recover them.

They reach the ship and press themselves tight against its sleek, silver wall, breathing hard with the run and the threat of the echoing footsteps that bounce off every surface here. Dean takes the snatched moment of respite to tangle one hand into the front of Cas' shirt – Dean still can't really believe he's here, chest heaving with exertion under Dean's fingers, and he's sure as shit not going to let him go this time.

Cas lays a hand briefly over Dean's, his fingertips skimming across Dean's skin, and then he's away again, moving stealthily along the line of the ship until he reaches the main door.

Dean realises now why else Cas chose this particular model – most ships would require external power in order to even open, let alone start up, which would initiate lighting and primary engine function, and which in turn would work as a giant beacon telling the soldiers exactly where they are. This, on the other hand, is a fairly out-dated model of cargo ships , one of the first ones used when the Allied Forces transitioned into life in space-stations, and probably shouldn't even still be here, but thank God it is. Cas unlocks it with the key-card stolen from the security guard that Doctor Niehammer had previously mentioned, and a short metal ladder folds down from the cockpit.

"Dean," Cas whispers. He presses both the guard's key-card and another small, metal key into Dean's palm, and then he grabs a handful of Dean's shirt to steer him towards the ladder.

Dean wastes no time doing as he's told – he climbs up, slips in through the dark, crouching low so as not to be seen through the windows, and makes his way towards the controls. It's been a long time since he's been in control of any aircraft, officially or otherwise, but he figures it's like riding a very large, sonic-powered bicycle, except with a lot more potential to fuck things up and kill everyone. Charlie follows him up, though, and he is content in the knowledge that if they combine their knowledge, they might nearly make one semi-competent pilot.

However, before Dean can even get into the pilot's seat, an enormous, white floodlight is switched on somewhere ahead of the ships, and everything is lit up with glaringly bright light that stops Dean dead in place.

"Freeze!" a male voice screams. "Nobody move! Put your weapon down immediately and then keep your hands where I can see them!"

Swearing, Dean drops to the floor in an attempt to flatten himself out of sight; Charlie follows suit with an inelegant squawk. They press themselves tight into the side of the pilot's seat.

In silence they wait, but whoever is outside makes no comment as to what the guys already in the ship should do, so Dean guesses they haven't been seen, and he takes this as his cue to get down on his hands and knees and crawl very slowly towards the window to see just what the fuck is going on. He shifts carefully around the corner of the cargo shelves, careful to avoid any sudden movements that might attract attention to him, and he peers around the side.

Cas and Sam stand frozen like deer caught in the light of a vehicle bearing rapidly down on them – Sam with his arms held out akimbo to make it extremely clear that he isn't holding a weapon; Cas with his hands lifted above his head. In one hand, he still loosely holds the pistol.

"Put the weapon down!" shouts the voice from behind the light once more. "Place the weapon on the ground and take three steps back from it – slowly, now!"

Cas stretches his fingers out to indicate that he's not really holding onto the pistol in any serious, threatening manner – only holding it pinched between finger and thumb – and Dean swears, "Shit," on a low exhalation as he realises what's about to happen a split-second before it does.

Cas spins. He moves so fast that no rifle sight nor human eye trained along an instinctive line of fire could follow him, and then he's behind Sam, one arm thrown tight around his neck, dragging him down to Cas' own slightly smaller height so that Sam is off-balance and vulnerably exposed, arm crushing back against Sam's windpipe, and Cas snaps the pistol up against Sam's temple. "Nobody move!"

Instantly there's a surge of blind rage that spikes up inside Dean's chest – no-one points a loaded pistol at his baby brother's head and gets away with it; read, no-one – but if he trusts Sam with anyone, he trusts Sam with Cas, and so Dean forces himself to take a deep breath. He ducks back into the ship.

"Start her up," Dean tells Charlie.

As Charlie gets to work starting up the primary engine functions with the minimum alert to the soldiers outside – no lights on in the cockpit; no movement from the engines; just oxygen and essential electrical circuits – and hacking into the ship's computerised mainframe, Dean crouches low again and hurries through to the back of the ship.

The supplies on-board are minimal; there are small boxes of meagre rations, a few large bottles of fresh water, and a tool-kit for internal ship maintenance. There are no weapons. Dean pauses in the doorway to the back supply room, one hand frozen on the doorjamb, and he huffs his breath out as he racks his brain for any way that they can get out of this situation.

Dean glances back towards the window for any sight of progress with Sam and Cas – and for one heart-stopping moment, he can't see them and he thinks that they've been taken in by Doctor Niehammer, and that it's all over. Then he catches a glimpse of Sam's sneakers just beneath and past the primary engines, and Dean shifts a little on his heels to see underneath.

"Charlie," he hisses through to the other end of the ship, where Charlie is tapping away furiously on the large LED screen mounted between the two pilots' seats in the cockpit. "I've got an idea."

Outside, Dean sees Sam shifts under Cas' grip, clearly uncomfortable, and in response, Cas digs the pistol's muzzle harder into the side of Sam's head – not as a threat, just a warning. The flex of Sam's fingers where he grips Cas' wrist, to lessen the crushing tightness of Cas' chokehold, is all trust. Dean's breath is strained in his chest.

"Everyone put your weapons on the ground and take three steps away from them," Cas orders, eyes narrowed over Sam's shoulder as he adjusts his grip on the pistol. His finger is on the trigger. "Now – everyone back or I shoot the medic!"

No-one moves.

Dean's eyes flicker frantically over the many dim, uniformed silhouettes cut out in defensive stances by the harsh white beam of the floodlight as it spills over the ship's sleek body and tail, and not a single one of them making any gesture towards surrender.

"Drop your weapons," Cas yells, his voice cracking with the strain, "or I shoot the medic – now!"

The problem becomes immediately clear. From deep within the silence comes the sharp clack of smart, heeled shoes on metal, and striding calmly forwards from the shadows comes Doctor Niehammer.

"By all means," she says, her voice cool and artificially pleasant. She comes to a neat halt some fifteen yards in front of Cas. "Be my guest."

Cas hesitates – only infinitesimally, the pistol's muzzle just barely easing off Sam's temple – but Naomi sees it.

She raises her eyebrows at him, the expression unnaturally friendly on that hollow face, and she goes on in gentle tones, as though trying to appeal to his scientific nature, "We have medics ten to the dozen – we can spare one of those. Androids, on the other hand…" She gives him a beatific smile. "Those are special. Wouldn't you agree?"

Cas seems to struggle with himself. The synthesised muscles in his arm jump nervously as he shifts his grip on Sam's throat, and his eyes dart from side to side. "I'm not special," he says, at last. "I'm just a machine."

Doctor Niehammer tilts forwards slightly on the balls of her feet. "I'm sorry, what was that?" she asks sweetly. "I didn't catch that."

"I'm just a machine," Cas repeats.

She blinks at him. "Again?"

"I said, I'm just a—" Cas cuts himself abruptly off as he realises what's happening. His jaw tightens with resentment; his mouth presses into a hard line.

"Incredible," Doctor Niehammer comments, with a lilt to her tone that suggests pride in her own achievements more than any real warmth towards Cas. "Even after all this, 5284, you are still inherently obedient - although you may wish to hide it. Then again, isn't that something remarkable in itself? Conscious desire, that is. You actually… long." Her eyes move from Cas to Sam, her gaze cold and critical. "Go ahead. Try to shoot him. You won't go through with it. You're too sentimental. You were always damaged like that."

Up against the window by the cockpit's door, Dean is holding his breath. He glances back towards Charlie for a progress update.

"Nearly ready," she whispers back, spinning partway in the pilot's seat to face him. "She's all set up and she can be ready to fly at ten secs' notice – all she needs now is powering up, and once you've got the brakes unlocked and the airlock ready, you'll be good for it, I think. How's it looking with Thelma and Louise?"

"Uh," Dean says, and where he was about to reply that everything was looking alright, his words melt swiftly into, "Can I get back to you on that?" because he presses back against the glass to watch the scene unfold with Sam, Cas, and Doctor Niehammer just in time to watch Cas shove Sam away from him and push the pistol, muzzle-up, against the underside of his chin.

"Get back," Cas says to Sam, his voice rough with the pistol's metal pressed tight against his throat. "Find Dean."

Sam staggers, rubbing his neck where Cas grabbed him, and at first he doesn't move; he glances wildly from Doctor Niehammer to Cas and back again, via every other soldier in the room, but when no-one makes a move to shoot or stop him, he slowly walks back until the bulk of the ship's body casts shadows in the beam of the floodlight, where he cannot be seen. Then Sam turns and hurries back towards the steps up to the ship and then scrambles up into the cock-pit.

Dean reaches out and grabs a fistful of Sam's clothes to help drag him into the ship, pulling him so hard he almost falls in, but once he's safely inside he's grateful. They find themselves on their knees at the back of the cock-pit, their hands on each other's arms to hold them still.

"Jesus Christ, are you okay?" Dean whispers.

Sam massages his throat again and just shakes his head, eyes wide with incredulity. "I don't know, man – Cas just said he was making it up as he went."

"Fuck." Dean lets out a long breath to try and steady himself, and then uses his grip on Sam's forearms to help him up. "Charlie, how are we coming along?"

"Fine – Sam?" Charlie gestures for him to come over, and before he even has time to question what's going on or what the plan is, she begins to show him the ship's controls. "Look – brakes. Gotta disable one through five in order to go anywhere. Secondary ship functions start-up here. These are the rear lights. Hit them whenever Cas is ready, and as soon as he's out of the way, you punch it," she tells him, and she slaps her hand lightly against the top of a large silver lever. "If nothing goes wrong, Cas'll be able to get in before the engines are fully powered up."

"If nothing goes wrong," Sam echoes.

"Then," she goes on, ignoring his concern, "you'll just have to take the brakes off, steer her around—" she smacks a large gearstick, "—and get the hell out. Cas should be able to help you by then." With that, an encouraging slap to Sam's shoulder, she leaps up out of her seat and moves as though to leave.

"Wait, Charlie – where are you going?" Sam hisses, twisting in his chair to reach out for her.

She turns back and raises her eyebrows in a way that makes clear that she's convinced her plan is the most obvious thing in the world. "Dude," she says. "Someone's gotta open the doors."

Sam stares at her, stupefied, and for a second says nothing as she flashes him a sunny grin and heads away down towards the cock-pit door

"But, Charlie, stop," Sam whispers urgently, half-rising out of his seat like he's considering following her. "If you do this – Charlie, we can't wait for you."

She rolls her eyes. "I'm not asking you to wait for me, Sam! I'm asking you to let me open the doors and then pretend I had no willing part in this. Got it?"

Dean tears his eyes away from Cas, down behind the engines, and looks over at Charlie, startled.

Sam blinks. "What?"

"I've been shot, Sam. I'll pretend Cas told me to get the doors at gunpoint," she tells him, and she glances between him and Dean. "Let's be honest, here – they're more likely to believe me than anyone else. I'm sorry, you guys. I'm not coming."

Dean swallows. "Okay." He nods. "Yeah. Sure."

"Don't get me wrong, Utah was – uh, nice," she says, her voice falsely high-pitched with excessive cheer as she picks her way carefully around Dean to get to the door. She places a hand on his shoulder – a blood-stained hand, admittedly, which leaves a sticky print on his sleeve, but the gesture is appreciated all the same. "But it was a little low-tech for me." She looks back towards Sam. "I love you guys, but I'd rather be here. Now, Sam – you got everything?"

Sam lets out a long, slow breath. "I guess."

She beams. "Great. Knock 'em dead," she says, and then amends, "Not – literally. But – okay." That's all they have time for; she doesn't even hug them goodbye, but just weaves past Dean and disappears down the narrow ladder out into the cargo bay, and then she's gone into the shadows under the nose of the plane. Dean exhales in a sharp burst, like having the air slashed from a tire, and he figures, two birds with one stone, so he turns back towards the cock-pit.

"Well, Sam," he says, his voice strained tight. "It's now or never."

"Dean, now's not the time," Sam hisses back, the sound of his fingertips tapping away on the ship's control a shallow drumbeat underneath his voice. "I'm coming and that's that." He breaks off from his typing for a moment - just long enough to throw a glare back over his shoulder at Dean. "Don't you dare tell me you're not gonna need a medic where you're going. Now watch for Cas!"

Back on the cargo bay floor, Cas stands with his pistol to his throat, unmoving, and Naomi must have said something that Dean didn't hear, because as he looks on, Cas huffs, a short sound that only Dean could recognise as a laugh. "You'd like that," Cas says. "Your little anomaly destroyed, without any of the responsibility."

Naomi doesn't react. "The thought had never crossed my mind."

"And what about this?" Cas pulls the pistol away from his throat, and slowly extends his arm to level it at Naomi.

Dean stops breathing. He tilts his chin slightly sideways towards the shoulder closest to Sam, never taking his eyes off Cas and Naomi. "Sam," he says quietly, and for a second Sam huffs his breath out like he's about to start in on Dean again for trying to leave him behind, but then Dean says it again, more slowly as the fear sets in - "Sam?" - and there must be something to the severity of his tone that causes Sam to freeze in his tracks. "We need to be ready to go – now."

"The only reason you're still standing right now is on good faith that you can be reasoned with," Doctor Niehammer says, outside, and she's far away, speaking softly now, so that Dean can barely hear their conversation anymore, but even across the distance, the unsettling serenity with which she speaks is enough to raise goose bumps on Dean's spine. Doctor Niehammer tilts her chin up at Cas; she looks down her nose. "The instant you shoot me, that will cease to be true, and my men will take you out."

"Sam," Dean urges.

"An instant too late, though, I'd think," Cas says calmly. He cocks the pistol, and the click of it rings in the hollow space like so much gunfire. "Let's give the scenario some equanimity - say we fire simultaneously. My aim against theirs. You created me, Doctor Niehammer – so tell me." Cas tips his head slightly over to one side. "Who do you think is the better shot?"

Dean's heart is in his mouth. "Sam?"

"I'm nearly there, Dean," Sam mutters frantically, "just give me—"

"Unit 5284-C-S-T-L," Doctor Niehammer says coldly, "this is your last chance to stand down."

"Stand down?" The corners of Cas' mouth turn up, just slightly. "I would've thought you knew us better than that."

"Sam?" Dean calls, raising his voice.

"Dean, I'm—"

"Sam!" Dean yells, and with one hand braced against the doorjamb he twists back to face the cock-pit. "Now!"

Sam hits the lights.

In the same moment as the ship's rear headlights come on harsh – white, and bright to the point of eye-searing and total incapacitation, as well Dean and Sam know – Dean swings out through the side door to shout, "Cas!" and he gets through the doorway just in time to see the split-second of total power that Cas is afforded when every human being in the immediate vicinity is totally blinded: the moment when Cas fires, and Doctor Niehammer's head is kicked sharply back.

All the air is cut from Dean's lungs.

"Cas," he says again, and the sound is lost over the roar of the engines; Sam punches it.

As all secondary engine functions is slammed on full, the flight engines kick into life with a dim roar that builds and builds until the whole ship is shuddering with it on its flimsy, out-dated supports, and all those within the engines' blast radiuses have less than ten seconds to say their goodbyes or get the fuck out of the way. Cas, on the other hand, is standing immobile directly behind the engines. The hand holding his pistol – the new hand, still stripped down to bare metal and wire – falls loosely to his side. In front of him lies Doctor Niehammer, crumpled.

"Cas!" Dean yells, his voice torn all to shreds by the hurricane-scream of the engines, but thankfully, as Sam unlocks the brakes and as the ship begins to slowly roll on its supports, Cas turns and runs for the stairs. Dean grabs a handful of his shirt to physically haul him in, and they slam the door shut after him.

Locked tight within the cock-pit, the thunder of the engines is no more than a gentle rumble beneath their feet as they taxi slowly around towards the airlock door, Sam fumbling clumsily with the controls as he steers. Cas picks his way through to the pilot's seat and sits down opposite Sam, who says nothing, but glances briefly over at Cas with warmth and relief. Nobody mentions the end of Doctor Niehammer.

Dean can't forget the instant of her head snapping violently back – it plays over and over in his head as he makes his way towards an extra seat that folds down from the wall behind the two main pilot seats in the cock-pit. However, he glances out the window as he sits down, peering back as they turn in the hopes of seeing Doctor Niehammer, with the thought that maybe one last glimpse of her body might set it concretely to his mind that it's over, that the danger is really gone. That's when Dean realises that Cas must have known something that no-one else did – something he wanted to expose to the rest of the world – because when Dean looks back, Naomi's body is gone, and not incinerated by the engines.

"Uh, you guys," Dean starts, bewildered. "This may seem a little irrelevant, but Doctor Niehammer—"

"Is not going to bother us anymore," Cas finishes bluntly.

Dean stares at him. "No, Cas, she's – gone."

Cas doesn't so much as bat an eyelid; he revs the engines up one notch and steers the ship towards in the waiting mouth of the airlock. As they approach, Dean sees two things through the side window – first, the shape of a red-haired woman in the control booth, concentrating too hard on her operations to look up at them as they pass; second, Doctor Niehammer, standing upright.

She appears, for the most part, uninjured, her usually sleek hair in disarray, her hands trembling furiously at her sides where they clench into fists – but the real damage is to her face, where she was shot, because while the bullet itself passed in and out of her head with no more lasting impact than a small, circular hole the size of a penny, the heat of the metal has melted her skin back to expose all that hard plastic and wiring underneath.

Dean understands now why Cas shot her, and why she won't be a problem anymore; there's no easy way for her to hide what she is now, and Dean can't imagine that her authority or funding will go much further once her military superiors realise that she's no more human than the Android soldiers she condemns.

"Holy shit," is all Sam can say, and Dean can't help but agree.

Naomi's hands hang limply at her sides like a cut-string puppet, and helplessly she watches them go.

Cas stares straight ahead, unflinching, and silently he cruises the ship out through the airlock, into the darkness, and together they fall.

As they settle into the journey already set out for them by Charlie's hacking and computerised route-planning, Sam calculates that they'll have maybe fifteen minutes until word gets out that they've escaped, a further fifteen minutes to decide who to send after them, and an hour maximum to power up whatever air force will be coming after them – altogether, less than two hours' head-start on their part.

Thankfully, they're not back at the main Alliance space-station, from which it would have been at least a ten-hour journey back to Earth; here, they're only four or five hours away, and so Dean likes to think that their escaping successfully before being shot down might actually succeed.

Two hours' head-start, Dean reminds himself as they fly. For a five hour flight. The odds aren't bad.

They make it three and a half before a warning light goes off on the control board, a shrill noise is emitted from one of the proximity detectors, and then the whole ship violently shudders, shaking safety equipment out of lockers and oxygen masks out of the ceiling, sending seatbelts to swing wildly from the backs of seats and clatter against the walls. Dean is in the small staff bathroom at the time, and almost falls down trying to wash his hands, and when he comes back out, everything is flashing lights and warning sirens.

"The hell was that?" he exclaims as he comes forwards to stand between Dean and Sam, and frantically scans the main board for any sign as to what's going on or what he should do about it.

From the co-pilot's seat, Sam reaches for the LED screen mounted between the two front seats and tilts it towards him. "I think we were just hit."

"By what?" Dean demands, and glances out of the window to his left as though expecting to see something there, like some ship on their heels with guns blazing.

"Hell if I know," Sam says, so while he and Cas are busy steering the ship and trying not to be shot, Dean gets up from his seat and leans forwards to check out the screen.

He taps into it what little of the ship damage procedure he can remember from his flight training, but before any definitive answers can load, the ship pitches again, thunder and fire rattling all through the hull, and Dean is thrown off-balance so that he nearly falls into Sam's lap.

"Shit," he mutters, and that's when the screen comes up with a response. First, it displays a rough display of the ship's layout, on which one of the nine sections is lit up red as being damaged; then it scrolls through to a visual image of the ship's proximity detector. There is their ship, a green flashing light in the centre, and some five miles to their rear are three other small lights that should not be there. One of them is illuminated red – the one that fired on them – and the rest are still neutrally white and waiting. "What do you think the chances are that those guys are lost and that this is all a big misunderstanding?"

"They fired on us, Dean," Sam reminds him. "Twice."

"Well, okay – so they fired on us," Dean retorts, throwing his hands up. "Now what? How do we respond to that? I don't know if you've noticed this, Sam, but this is a cargo ship. We can't fight, we can't defend ourselves – hell, we can barely fly—"

"Will you two shut up?" Cas snaps, and as Dean and Sam both fall silent to look over, they find Cas focused on the LED screen, which is lit up now with an entirely different message. "Someone is calling through."

Cas types into the keypad on the corner of the screen, and then there is a crackle, a hiss of the radios trying to connect – silence – and then: "Boys? Sergeant and Doctor Winchester, plus – I don't know, whatever the hell you call him – Cas? Come in. This is Warrant Officer Mills. Over."

"Mills?" Sam exclaims in surprise, leaning forwards to get closer to the speakers. "Roger that, this is Doctor Winchester speaking. No offense, ma'am, but what are you—"

"Winchester, stop talking, there isn't much time," Mills cuts across him. "My buddies and I are part of the ahead team – ships already in flight, to chase you down and make sure we didn't lose you before they could power up the big guns to take you down – but the others are following and they'll be here soon. And just between me and you, I don't know how kindly they're gonna treat you. Over."

Sam glances back at Dean and lets out a long breath. "Okay," he says. "Thanks for the heads-up. Over."

"I'm not here to give you a heads-up, idiot," her voice comes back irritably. "I'm here to mess shit up for everyone. I already shot out your black box – silly me, so clumsy with these big old controls in my feeble, womanly hands – which is unfortunate, 'cause, see, if you were to somehow escape now, we'd have no way to track down where you go." Mills clears her throat. "Damaged black boxes are inconvenient like that. Over."

"Oh," is all that Dean can say once he realises what's going on.

Cas' brow furrows into a deep frown and he temporarily looks away from the controls to look instead at the screen from which Mills' voice is crackling. "Warrant Officer Mills, are you suggesting that we—"

"Let's get this straight right now – I am not suggesting anything," Mills retorts down the line. "I am telling you that through a series of misunderstandings, I have accidentally shot out your black box, and that as a result of this, it would be very easy to lose track of your whereabouts. Do I make myself clear? Over."

"Roger that, Mills," Sam replies, nudging Cas in the stomach with his elbow; he gestures with his hands for Cas to resume flying immediately. "We understand perfectly. Over."

"Alrighty, then. Glad that's cleared up." There's a faint laugh from the other end. "Now, if my pursuit team should briefly slow down to check our maps, and if I were to foolishly take my eyes off you while we did that, would you still be here when we got back to business? Over."

Dean's face splits into a grin broad enough to hurt. "Impossible to say, ma'am. Over – and thank you," he adds, as an after-thought, his finger still pressing down the transmission button in the top left corner of the central. "Over. And out."

He lets go, and with a little laugh he returns back to his seat where it folds down from the wall behind Sam's co-pilot seat. Sam starts laughing then, too – they can't help it, being giddy with the possibility that they could get out of this okay – and he returns to the controls.

They fly, their eyes on the murky globe of the Earth up ahead, veiled with a loose swirl of silvery clouds. They're close enough now that they can't see the bigger picture; the majority of their fore-facing window is taken up by the planet, hung seemingly immobile.

When Cas checks the flight-plan on the screen, it reads that they're only two hundred thousand feet up from the surface – now seems as good a time as any to begin a slow, easy descent into the mesosphere. However, as soon as he takes the ship out of auto-pilot for manual descent, a warning light illuminates on the main control board.

"The hell is that?" Dean asks.

Cas doesn't answer. He leans across and starts tapping into the screen until he finds the visual image of the ship's layout and how its various mechanical sections are faring – where previously only one small section was lit up red, there are now two.

"I don't understand," Cas mutters, and there is real concern buried under all the rough toneless gravel of his voice. His hands move swiftly on the controls, flipping switches, adjusting dials., "No-one fired on us since Warrant Officer Mills and I controlled the damage she did to us… She shouldn't have caused us any serious problems – unless she hit something else besides the black box—"

"You mean like the starboard rear fuel tank?" Sam asks, his voice tight.

"Fuck," Dean says.

Cas types hurriedly into the screen and then twists away in his seat to check another small screen to his right. "Starboard rear fuel tank hit – fuel leaking into both the rear storage compartments and into the starboard rear engine," he rattles off monotonously, and then something he sees makes him pause – he lets out a long, slow exhalation, as though to steady himself – and then he's back to functioning at a hundred miles an hour. "We've got a fire in the starboard fire engine as well."

"Is that all?" Sam says sarcastically, and Dean knows that he only means to lighten the moment, but it doesn't work – especially when the words leaving his mouth are almost instantly followed by the whole ship jerking violently with a judder that thunders through all their bones and metal. As Dean, Sam, and Cas cling to control to keep themselves upright, the dashboard lights up with several more red flashing lights, orange switches illuminated in their urgency to be flipped, and a low repetition of warning, warning, warning sounds from the speakers in an automated female voice.

Dean gasps, "What the fuck was—"

"Rear engine explosion – we've lost the rear port engine as well, now," Cas says hurriedly. "Sam – shut down all engines except one, two, and four – we need to quarantine the fire before it spreads any further. We're going immediately into our descent."

"On three engines?" Sam asks incredulously, staring at him.

"How many engines do we have?" Cas asks distractedly as he fights the controls for any authority over the ship's movement.

"Three, now—"

"Then yes." The hull judders and lets out a loud screeching, and yet another red warning light flashes on above their heads; Cas barely flinches at the noise. He checks the last few dials and then glances across at Sam. "Have you done it?"

"Cas, we can't maintain altitude with only three engines," Sam exclaims. "We'll go down too fast – we'll—"

"We don't have time to adjust," Cas interrupts, and there is a strain to his voice now, as well, and his eyes flicker down to the screen between them once more, where now four of nine of the ship's sections are lit up red. "I'm sorry, but if we don't start our descent now, we'll either run entirely out of fuel and be trapped up here at three hundred thousand feet until the Alliance find us, or the ship will simply catch fire. At least that'll be a quicker death for us all, but personally, I am partial to giving a descent on three engines a shot."

Dean opens his mouth, but can find neither the will nor the words to argue. He just stares at Cas, his chest tight with fear, with the thought spinning endlessly through his head that he'd been ready to give up everything for Cas, but that he hadn't thought it was going to end like this.  
e give it a shot."

Dean opens his mouth, but can find neither the will nor the words to argue. He just stares at Cas, his chest tight with fear, with the thought spinning endlessly through his head that he'd been ready to give up everything for Cas, but that he hadn't thought it was going to end like this.

When Dean doesn't answer, Cas drags his eyes away from the controls to find him. "Dean," he says.

Dean swallows. "Yeah," he manages. "Okay. Let's – yeah."

Cas looks back towards the controls. "Sam?"

Sam's hands flex on the thrust lever as he fights to keep control of its wild, off-balanced jerking between settings. "What do you want me to do?"

They punch all the leftover fuel in all tanks to the two remaining rear engines – and while it effectively takes them out of their slow blind tailspin and fires them out of orbit like a rubber band from a slingshot, it means that they have little to no control over the height of their ship. They go down, and they go down fast.

On the cockpit's ceilings, light after light after frantic, flashing red light illuminate to let them know how wrong everything is going, and there are at least two sirens overlapping each other in their wailing distress calls – warning, warning, sudden decrease in altitude, warning, engine failure – and the ship itself is jerking wildly as the fuel chokes – another engine goes out, and the ship starts to spin, and they're going down too fast.

"Shit, Cas, what do I do?" Sam panics, and he continues to cling to his lever as to a life support, although his effect on the ship's decreasing height is less than negligible. "Cas?"

Cas isn't listening. He has both hands locked hard onto the ship's gearstick and is yanking it backwards towards him so hard that it's not entirely impossible that Cas could rip it clean off the mainboard. "One sixty thousand feet – entering the stratosphere… Pull up, pull up, pull up," he mutters to himself, eyes flashing urgently between the controls and the window before him. "Come on – no – Dean, drop the excess weight!"

Dean blanches. "From here? Isn't that just gonna stay in—"

"Drop it!"

Whatever was in the hold of this ship, Dean hopes it wasn't important, because he slams down four different individual levers to the various lower storage compartments, and it's all gone now. It's not enough, though – even Dean can tell, from his point back of the pilot's seats, that the weight they just lost is nowhere enough to make any difference towards the speed at which they're now plummeting earthwards.

Through what little of the window is not yet covered in thick, pearly condensation, Dean can glimpse the planet's surface, larger and more unforgiving as it draws ever nearer, and Dean's heart twists painfully in his chest as his eyes track over the land below – or lack thereof.

"Cas," he starts, swallowing hard, "not to harsh anyone's buzz right now, but we're pretty far out over the ocean—"

"That's unfortunate," Cas remarks absent-mindedly. They're falling fast now. "One twenty thousand feet… come on, pull up, pull up," he urges, and for the first time since Cas' confessions in the Arizona desert, so many weeks ago, Dean sees real fear in Cas' face, crumpling the set of his mouth and brow. ""One hundred thousand feet—"

The ship is shaking now as though it could literally shudder free of its nuts and bolts to fall apart mid-air; Dean can almost feel his bones rattling in their joints, and all the air is punched from his lungs so that he's fighting for breath even just clinging into his seat. "Cas, is there anything I can do, or—?"

"Have you got a seatbelt on?" Cas asks.

"Uh—"

"Put it on." He glances upwards at the window, through which hardly anything can be seen now through the mist and condensation smeared over it, but Dean figures that at the moment, being able to see exactlywhere they're going to crash and burn might not be the biggest priority. "Seventy thousand feet – speed's increasing – Sam, do you have any power for reverse thrusters?"

"I can give it a go, but—"

"Sixty thousand feet." Cas' voice is rising with something close to panic. "Now, please, Sam."

Sam reaches across to another of the thick silver levers that jerk beyond his control, and he slams it down hard against the mainboard , but although the ship's remaining engines emit a sound like a sneeze , nothing of any real significance happens – they are still hurtling ever downwards.

"Sam?" Cas calls, louder now.

"That's it, that's all I had—"

Dean's heart is thunderous inside his chest. "Cas, I hate to be the pessimist here but—"

"Thirty thousand feet – Sam, do you have anything else?"

"Cas, I'm sorry—"

The rattling of the ship is so loud now that nothing else can be heard. The window is so smeared full of mist that even as the ground hurtles up to meet them, next to nothing can be seen of it.

"Pull up, come on, come on," Cas whispers desperately, still clinging to the gearstick as though maybe he can still yank them out of this. "No – twelve thousand feet – ten thousand – nine – I'm sorry—"

Dean takes a deep breath; he exhales.

"Brace for impact," Cas yells, his voice rising frantically as the metres run out and the sirens issue one last scream and his hands come off the gearstick and he half-turns in his seat— "Dean—"

The ship hits the ground.

  


All is darkness and silence.

Dean wakes up to his own name being called, over and over, in tones of increasing worry. At first, he thinks that something's gone wrong and he can't see – he blinks several times and the darkness around him in no dissipates or clears – but then slowly he picks out dim light flashing red and orange among the gloom, and in front of those, two indistinct outlines in the dark

Dean coughs and splutters, tasting soot thick on his tongue, and tries hoarsely, "Sam?" He clears his throat. "Cas, is that—?"

There are hands on Dean's face, then, fingers tucked under the hinge of his jaw to check his pulse, and the white beam of a flashlight clicks into life to fall brightly upon him.

Temporarily blinded, Dean flinches away from the bright light, it does illuminate their situation – specifically, the ship being tilted on an angle so that the front of the ship tips away downwards, and is rolled partway over to the left side. Thin, pale smoke churns out of the mainboard to twist upwards in idle coils, and though it will eventually fill the ship, it is only beginning to do so slowly; the glass in the ship's front window is cracked in three places, although nothing but a heavy, irregular darkness that Dean guesses to be dirt can be see through it; the lockers at the side of the cockpit have broken open and their doors swing uselessly; one locker has been entirely wrenched free from the wall by the impact and that, Dean realises, is what has pinned his leg. "Oh, crap."

Cas' breath cuts out short at the sight of it. "Sam?"

As Sam sits back, swearing, to check how Dean's leg is faring underneath the buckled metal of the locker, Cas shifts the flashlight to give him a better view of the overall situation, and Dean sees their faces for the first time since they crashed – Sam has a black eye coming on, plus an ugly red wound at his hairline where he must have smacked into the control panel on impact; Cas is, of course, completely uninjured. They both seem to have fared better for having been in permanent, properly constructed seats, although Dean can see Sam wincing with his every move, so he must've got pretty badly fucked up by the seat-belt. Nonetheless, the main thing is that they're still alive and that they've made it, and as Dean grits his teeth hard against a pain that grows stronger with every passing second, Cas pries the locker away from his leg. Under his hands, the metal bends like wet cardboard.

The leg is broken: that much is clear. Just above the ankle is a swollen lump that sends hot sparks of pain all up Dean's leg and hip when jarred, and the skin around is steadily turning black. Beyond the pain, Dean isn't too concerned – he knows that Sam can fix it – and at the moment his only real concern is getting the hell off this ship, and as far as possible from all things Alliance. As well as everything else, there's a strong smell of gas pervading the ship's air, and Dean guesses that can't mean anything good.

The angle at which the ship crashed has left the side-door some five to seven yards up of them on a slope of about thirty degrees, so that to get out they have to crawl and slide and cling to the edges, to each other, climbing up and up, bloody fingers slipping on the metal, bruises blossoming under their skin where they fall and crash against hard edges, and then Sam is banging, banging, on the battered door until it pops. There's a long hiss as the cabin de-pressurises, and then there is sunlight.

The air is cool, fresh enough in their open mouths to make their teeth sting, with the spiky, cold scent of pine needles and petrichor. As the door swings open, they are silent with near-holy reverence at the sight of the small rectangle of grey sky they are offered.

One by one they help each other out – warm hands clutching, fingers interlaced – and with stooped shoulders and cramped muscles they pull themselves up tall to stand on the sloped roof of their stolen cargo ship, its metal panels slick underfoot with the early dew.

They climb down, gingerly, plant their feet on solid ground. For one idle second, Dean forgets his ankle and he lands hard, nearly crumpling into the soil except for the hands that catch him. Sam winds an arm around his waist to prop him up, slings Dean's hand over his shoulder so that Dean can cling to his neck as he walks if need be, and together they walk.

The crash site where they find themselves is an ugly dirt scar, a slash so many miles long that it disappears back through the trees as far as the eye can see like some crudely carved dirt highway slashing through some northern forest territory – Dean wouldn't be able to tell you where, but they'd been aiming for North America so he doesn't know that they could've missed the whole continent. This place is all soft dark mud and ragged leaning evergreens with sharp branches that pierce upwards at the sky's swollen belly, a swirl of greys and blues that promise downpour. Dean doesn't remember the impact of the ship hitting the ground, and he certainly doesn't remember tearing up a runway as they skid and rolled for miles, but the trees that caught them are shattered out of shape, with broken branches dangling. Even with their presence now ripping a hole in this place, however, it feels clean. And clean, Dean decides, is good.

All around where their ship's nose is buried deep into the ground, a high mound of loose dirt, rock, and shredded tree-roots has been torn up, and with Sam slowed down by supporting Dean's weight, Cas ends up wandering a little ahead of them; he rounds the corner first, and neither Dean nor Sam can see what he can when he stops dead.

"Cas, you okay?" Dean calls, and his arm tightens around Sam's neck to urge him forwards. "What's up?"

At first, Cas simply doesn't reply. Then, he just says, very softly, "Dean."

Sam shifts his grip on Dean's waist and helps him to hobble faster – but as soon as they catch up to Cas, they see exactly what has so changed him, and they too stop in their tracks.

This scrap of land which they struck at hundreds of miles per mile only lasts another twenty yards or so before the tall, ethereal sway of the pine trees cut away to low, prickly tangles of evergreen shrubs, and then drops away altogether to a rugged precipice of hard black rock worn smooth with the repetitive drum of rainwater against its edges – and below that, the ocean.

It's blue. Dean could have told Cas that much, six hundred miles of desert from the coastline, but it doesn't do the colour justice – the rippling opalescence of it, the way it foams pale and silvery as it crashes against the rocks at the base of the cliff-face, the way the thin light of an overcast afternoon casts its surface a shade that's dark and shimmering as twilight when all the stars are out.

"Holy crap," Sam says gently, but Dean isn't even looking out at the sea.

"So what do you think?" Dean asks Cas.

Cas doesn't answer; his eyes never leave the breathless expanse of water that glitters as far as the eye can see and further. His lips are parted as though he's struggling with the words, and in the end he presses his mouth tightly closed as though he doesn't trust human language to justly convey what all this means. He threads his fingers through Dean's – his, bare metal and plastic; Dean's, all bone and bruising and human fragility – and under Dean's touch, his hands stop shaking.

They don't speak. They just breathe it in, the salt and the sunlight, and there, at the ends of the earth, with blood in Sam's hair, with Dean's ankle throbbing white-pain with pain at every dull beat of his pulse, with Cas' hand a soft touch on the back of Dean's wrist, it starts to rain.


End file.
